


shine on, you crazy bosh'tet

by ChocolateCoveredPortals



Series: full of stardust and sniper rifles [1]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Graphic Descriptions of Injuries, Medical Procedures, Mental Health Issues, Platonic Relationships, Post-Control Ending, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-01-16 14:41:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21272852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChocolateCoveredPortals/pseuds/ChocolateCoveredPortals
Summary: The last anyone had seen of Commander Shepard was her back as she turned to make her final, desperate rush toward the Citadel beam. In the long months after the blue wave of energy swept throughout the galaxy—along with the command for every Reaper to self-destruct—and with the Normandy cut off from all communications, it was all too easy to pretend they didn't know if she'd survived. All too easy to pretend that she'd once again slipped away from death.Against all odds, she had.





	1. ...to chase a feather in the wind

_ _

_Should I fall out of love, my fire in the light_   
_To chase a feather in the wind_   
_Within the glow that weaves a cloak of delight_   
_There moves a thread that has no end_

_\- _Led Zeppelin, ["All My Love"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwFz3EThGMU)

* * *

The first thought that goes through Tali'Zorah's mind when the sound of the elevator startles her out of her slumber is _Kaidan's doing his rounds again. _Not _Shepard's doing her rounds_, a mistake that she found herself correcting over and over, each time bringing another jolt of grief.

She almost wishes he would stop.

In the weeks since the blue shockwave from the Crucible had hit the Charon relay at the same moment as the Normandy SR-2, flinging them ancestors-know-where instead of the rendezvous point in Arcturus and crashing (though Joker liked to insist it was just a "rough landing") into an uncharted garden world, he'd tried a little _too _hard to emulate Shepard.

The _rounds_, for instance. One of Shepard's stubborn little habits, and something Tali had initially thought was some sort of strange human custom--no quarian captain would ever manage to find the time to go around twice a day and personally speak to every single person aboard the ship. Although Kaidan has the sense to restrict his rounds to once a day, both rations and tempers are running short for the crew of the Normandy, and he's mostly just using up valuable calories that a biotic could scarcely afford to lose.

It takes Tali a few moments to realize that Kaidan's not actually on his rounds. Usually, he first goes to the port cargo area to talk to Javik--from the few snippets of conversation that she sometimes overhears, mostly to make sure that their resident Prothean wasn't planning to throw anyone out of the airlock. But right now, he's making his way directly toward her, his footsteps a little quicker than usual.

When her people had reclaimed their homeworld and Tali had returned to her duties on the Normandy, she'd set up a cot right in engineering, across from her station. At one point, it might have been practical: with the other engineers bunking up on the crew deck, having somebody close by in case an emergency came up made sense. And although she's a quarian, used to living in close quarters, she has somehow come to prefer the company of the thrum of the Normandy's drive core, the heartbeat of the ship.

Plus, the others didn't need to overhear her late-night intercom conversations with a certain turian.

Maybe it wasn't practical now. With everybody ordered to rest as much as possible to conserve their energy and EDI taking over pretty much everything--including the helm when Joker finally admitted that the pain of the bones shattered in the Normandy's "rough landing" was far worse than he'd let on--she's remained down in Engineering, even if it meant a daily elevator ride to the crew deck to receive her allotment of nutrition paste. Some days, it almost doesn't seem worth the effort.

Although she's careful to lift herself from the cot slowly, the dizziness nearly overwhelms her at first. She allows herself a moment to adjust to her wobbly legs, struggling to ignore the swimming feeling in her head, the ever-painful gnaw in her stomach, and how loosely her envirosuit drapes off of her shoulders. It's not just mere hunger at this point, but something nearing _starvation_. Before the Normandy had departed for their final assault on Earth, they'd had enough rations to last around a month, provided they were careful. It's been almost three.

_ (During the rounds, Engineer Adams had once joked that he wasn't sure he wanted to know what strings Shepard had to pull to keep their pantry full during wartime shortages; it was normally a job for the executive officer, but for reasons known only to her own inscrutable mind, Shepard had never gotten around to assigning one._

_ "Strange you should ask." She leaned against the railing, just at the edge of Tali's limited peripheral vision. Dark skin, dark hair cropped close to her scalp, thin and wiry, and almost a head shorter than Tali--people who knew of the great Commander Shepard's reputation before coming face-to-face with her were sometimes disappointed that she didn't look more like the tall, muscular, heroic-looking soldiers in the Alliance recruitment ads. "'I tried to sell my soul last night--funny, he wouldn't even take a bite.'"_

_ It was several seconds before Adams responded. "...what?"_

_ "Yeah. Said there was too much rock 'n' roll, not enough sex and drugs."_

_ Donnelly made what Tali assumed was a comment about their commanding officer's fraternization with the Major--his accent might as well been a language of its own with the way it constantly defied the adjustments she made to her translator. Daniels' exasperated response confirmed it. _

_ Shepard didn't even blink. "No idea what you're talking about."_

_ Tali turned to look at her, arms crossed. "Shepard, you _ _ **do ** _ _realize that sound carries through the ship, right?"_

_ "...oh. Huh. _ _ **Shit.** _ _"_

_ Just when Tali thought she'd managed to fool Shepard--if any noise did somehow make its way down to engineering from the captain's cabin, it'd probably just be from her stereo--Engineer Adams let out a noise that sounded somewhere between a snort and a cough. _

_ Shepard's bright green eyes narrowed as they focused on Tali. "Almost had me there, Tali. Guess I shouldn't have kept asking when you planned to do a reenactment of Fleet and Flotilla." She gave a short laugh. "But as a wise man once said, 'we've gotta hold on to what we've got--it doesn't make a difference if we make it or not.'"_

_ Tali shook her head, and Adams looked up from his control panel. "Commander, did you just quote...Bon Jovi?"_

_ "Nope." Shepard gave a small shrug. "Lynyrd Skynyrd, actually.")_

By the time Kaidan arrives, she's hunched over her control panel, pretending to be doing something important. He walks up next to her and gives a slight frown when he realizes she's pressing the same few buttons over and over, to no effect. She stops.

"Good to see you, Kaidan," Tali says, and immediately regrets it; she isn't able to entirely conceal the edge of aggravation in her voice. She tries again, and manages to sound a little more sincere. "You need something?"

It was only logical that Major Alenko should take over command of the Normandy; the ship was flying Alliance colours, and he was the highest-ranking Alliance officer aboard, as well as being a Spectre. And in the first few weeks immediately following the Normandy's crash-landing, he had done his duties well: despite the injuries he'd sustained in London, he had pulled the crew together, focusing their efforts into getting the ship repaired before their food stores gave out.

At least, that's what the others told her. Tali herself had been delirious with fever at the time, and had nearly _died _before Dr. Chakwas came across the right cocktail of antibiotics to wipe out the worst of her infection. Her suit hadn't just been punctured, it had been _shredded,_ exposing her to open air. It had taken her time to recover, time for her to figure out how she'd ended up in the Normandy's clean room, time for her to realize that Shepard--

"Tali," Kaidan's voice interrupts her thoughts. "Do you have any idea what the geth are doing in this system?"

_ How should I know? I'm not a geth._ She doesn't say it, though, and immediately begins to worry; it wouldn't take much to shatter the fragile peace that organics shared with the geth. But there's no way to know for sure if that happened. Despite their best efforts, the Normandy's crew hadn't been able to repair the damage to the QEC; between that and the comm buoys suffering the same fate as the mass relays, the Milky Way was large and empty. Too large and empty. The crew of the Normandy have been completely cut off from everyone else.

Keelah, no wonder everyone was getting on each others' nerves.

Finally, Tali speaks. "I don't know."

"But--do you know if they're still on our side? Or if they could be some of those heretics your geth friend was taking about?"

Tali straightens herself, trying not to yell. "Kaidan, _I don't know." _

"No, you're right." He pauses a moment, running a hand along the back of his neck and exhaling softly. He looks almost skeletal at this point, having restricted himself to the same limited rations as everyone else. "It's just--"

It's easy to guess. They may have gotten the Normandy space-worthy again, but neither she nor her crew were in shape for combat against hostile geth.

"I wish Shepard was here," Kaidan finally says. His head droops slightly, as though the weight of it is too much of a burden to bear for the moment. "She'd know what to do."

"You knew her better than anyone." Tali's voice is soft. "What do you think she'd do?"

"Aside from quote one of her old songs? She would--probably point out that she's not here, and then ask me what _I _think we should do." Some of the tension seems to leave his shoulders, and he shakes his head slightly. "EDI, what do we have?"

_"Passive sensors are picking up energy signatures consistent with a geth ship. Range, approximately ten thousand kilometers." _EDI's voice is tinny through the intercom's speakers. _"The Normandy's stealth drive is allowing us to remain undetected. However, many of our kinetic emitters and main gun were both damaged during the crash."_

He grimaces. "EDI, prepare an escape vector, and open a communications channel. Be ready to jump to FTL if they turn hostile."

_ "At once, Major."_

Tali finds it strange that he doesn't call everyone to their stations--that's what Shepardprobably would have done--but decides against commenting on it. Kaidan pauses once again, his shoulders lifting and falling slightly as he takes a long breath. Then he speaks, his voice as authoritative as a half-starved soldier could possibly make it. "This is Major Alenko of the SSV Normandy SR-2."

The mechanical voice of a geth comes over the intercom, sounding so much like Legion had that Tali has to remind herself again that it couldn't be:

_"Major Alenko, geth units aboard this transport vessel are prepared to offer any required assistance. We are also able to provide provisions for the organics onboard the Normandy."_

A wave of dizziness and relief nearly overcomes Tali, and she braces herself against the control panel. Oh, keelah_. _Provisions meant _food. _

_"Admiral Hackett has also requested that we convey information to the Normandy consensus about the status of Shepard-Commander."_

For several heartbeats, Tali's vision narrows to a pinprick of light. Her envirosuit automatically increases the concentration of oxygen, and then she finally remembers to _breathe. _Beside her, Kaidan is pale. Shepard had been Tali's crazy bosh'tet captain, her best friend, practically her sister_. _But for Kaidan, Shepard had been something completely different.

As long as their communications had been down, it had been so easy to _pretend _that they didn't know if Shepard had survived, so easy to disregard the fact that she'd been barely able to speak in her last radio message to the Normandy, that she had been right next to the Crucible when it had released enough energy to not only wipe out every Reaper in the galaxy, but take out the mass relays as well.

_ (Now that she no longer had to devote it to calculations to help combat the Reapers, EDI had reallocated some of her processing power into analyzing the signal that she had detected embedded deep within the blue energy that had washed over the Normandy, one that might've taken her offline or worse if she hadn't immediately modified her programming. One that had still temporarily overloaded parts of the systems that she hadn't been completely able to separate from Sovereign's hardware._

_ A command, telling every Reaper to self-destruct._

_ And it had worked. Just a few thousand klicks away from the mass relay the Normandy had been thrust through--its gyroscopic rings shattered, its eezo core dissipated into the emptiness of space--was the corpse of a reaper, just barely visible against the backdrop of distant stars. Sovereign-class, and a grim reminder of the inert reaper that had orbited Mnemosyne, of a supposedly dead god that could still dream. _

_ This one didn't dream. Its mass effort core had exploded, tearing it apart from the inside out._

_ When Major Alenko called the crew together to brief them about the length of time it'd take to return to Sol, or what was left of it--not the few hours or days they'd all anticipated, but a few _ _ **months** _ _\--EDI found opportunity to bring up the subject. There was something strange about the signal, something that she wasn't able to determine._

_ "It does not matter," Javik said, his four eyes slowly blinking in unison. "The Reapers have been destroyed. That is answer enough.")_

It was easy enough to pretend, but it was Kaidan who actually seemed to _believe _that Shepard might not be--gone. That she had slipped away from death once more.

"Do you think..." He trails off as it finally seems to sink in. "Was she happy? Do you think she wanted to--?"

"She lovedyou, Kaidan." The conviction in her own voice surprises her, and she reaches over to touch his arm. "She didn't _want_ to leave you behind."

But she had. The last that anyone had seen of Shepard was her back as she turned to make her last, desperate rush toward the Citadel beam. Tali doesn't remember it. Her suit process logs said that had overridden protocols to increase her dosage of antibiotics and painkillers to unsafe levels, but she has no recollection of doing that either. Sometimes, brief glimpses of half-formed memories trickle through to her mind, usually through her nightmares: purple fabric stained with red, the smell of burning flesh and metal and eezo coming through a shattered visor, and a desperate voice--if it didn't sound so panicked, she could almost swear it's Shepard--calling for an evac.

"But was it enough?" He looks down at his hands--no, at the ring that Tali had never noticed on his finger. It seems familiar, but she can't place where she'd seen it before. "No. It wasn't about--I mean, she was a soldier. She _had_ to put the mission first. I just wish..." He doesn't finish the sentence, and eventually turns back to the intercom. "EDI, transmit rendezvous coordinates."

_"Affirmative."_

But he can't bring himself to ask about Shepard. So Tali does.

"This is Admiral Tali'Zorah vas Normandy of the Migrant Fleet. What can you tell us about Shepard?"

_"Following the activation of the Crucible and the destruction of the Old Machines, Shepard-Commander was discovered at the Tower."_

Kaidan chokes out the words. "Her body."

_"No. Shepard-Commander's platform was not destroyed. She was discovered alive."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yet another fanfic comes out of me being unhappy with the ending of a video game. This time, Mass Effect 3.
> 
> Of course, it quickly ballooned out of control. Nearly six months and a full rewrite later, here we are.


	2. ...i'm not dead and i'm not for sale

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Implied self-harm, non-graphic description of a suicide attempt.

_I am, I am I said I'm not myself  
But I'm not dead  
And I'm not for sale  
Hold me closer, closer  
Let me go  
Let me be  
Just let me be_

\- Stone Temple Pilots, ["Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVPzWkdhwrw)

* * *

Keystroke** Recording  
** **Omni-Tool Use  
** **SSV Normandy SR-2**

\- BEGIN NEW MESSAGE

"Commander Shepard,"  
\- ERASE LINE

"Shepard,"  
\- SAVE PROGRESS

"Our QEC was damaged when the Normandy crashed, but the geth"  
\- ERASE LINE

"The geth helped us repair the damage to our QEC, and Admiral Hackett offered to forward any messages we want to send. I don't know if you can read this yet"  
\- PARTIAL LINE ERASE

"you're feeling well enough to read this yet, but I might as well."  
\- SAVE PROGRESS

"The Normandy's crew is doing well. I nearly died from an infection"  
\- PARTIAL LINE ERASE

"had an infection for a while, but I'm doing much better now. We're all relieved that you didn't die"  
\- PARTIAL LINE ERASE

"survived the final battle. We would have come back sooner, except that whatever the Crucible did also destroyed"  
\- PARTIAL LINE ERASE 

"damaged the mass relays. We've been making our way home"  
\- PARTIAL LINE ERASE

"back to Sol with conventional FTL travel. We're only a few weeks away now."  
\- SAVE PROGRESS 

"We're all worried about you"  
\- ERASE LINE 

"We all miss you"  
\- PARTIAL LINE ERASE 

"care about you"  
\- PARTIAL LINE ERASE 

"love you."  
\- SAVE DRAFT AND EXIT 

Tali stretches out a bit more on the lounge sofa in hopes that it'll relieve the discomfort of solid food distending her stomach. For the first time since she'd emerged from the Normandy's clean room so many weeks ago, her mind isn't shrouded with the fuzziness that made it difficult to think, but doesn't make it any easier to figure out what to say. At times like these, when words seem an unnecessarily cumbersome way to get her thoughts across, she can almost understand Shepard's tendency to lapse into bouts of silence.

Focusing on the news reports takes less effort.

_ Wrex_ and _gentle_ are two words that Tali never thought she'd use in the same sentence. Her first impression of him was of a moving bulwark of muscle and biotic power charging into a dark alleyway in the Citadel wards to kill two of the assassins that were trying to kill _her_.

Some people might question Shepard's decision to bring a krogan battlemaster along on a mission to track down a rogue Spectre—usually the same sort of people who questioned her decision to allow a quarian free access to the engine room of a prototype Alliance starship—but it wasn't hard to understand _why. _Hostiles focused on the krogan were that less likely to notice the lone figure skirting around their flank to take position. If Wrex was a bulwark, Shepard was a scalpel with a tactical cloak and a sniper rifle.

_(Tali didn't have much time to wonder about the sudden appearance of the krogan before something_ _grabbed her arm and yanked her back into cover. The third assassin's gun suddenly overheated in his hands, there was a gunshot, and then, almost in slow-motion, he crumpled to the floor, a hole in his chest._

_ "You okay?" came a female voice, but it was neither from the krogan nor the turian C-Sec who'd just appeared. The cold knot of apprehension that'd first formed inside Tali when she'd discovered that geth patrol in the Crescent Nebula only seemed to solidify—_

_ "Commander," the turian said, with what seemed to be a tone of exasperation. "Your cloak."_

_ "Fuck." A word that Tali recognized as a decidedly human curse even before a human shimmered into existence beside her. "You okay?"_

_ —and then flared into sheer anger. "Fist set me up! I knew I couldn't trust him!"_

_ The human spoke as she unloaded the thermal clips from her sniper rifle. "'And when the hit man comes, he knows damn well he has been cheated.'"_

_ "...what?"_

_ "Don't worry about Fist. Our krogan associate dealt with him." She collapsed the rifle and holstered it on her back._

_ The krogan stood there, impassive. "He brought it on himself."_

_ "Uh, yeah." The human waited a few seconds for Tali to say something, then switched to a vaguely intelligible but rather stilted version of Khelish. "Are you hurt? I have dextro medigel."_

_ "No," Tali said once she came to the conclusion that these three were not the enemy. "I know how to look after myself."_

_ "Against those three?" The human switched back to her own language. She walked over to the corpses, and crouched down to examine them. "You could probably handle them, so long as you didn't panic. They clearly underestimated you."_

_ "Um—"_

_ "Yeah." The human stood up, moving with a kind of restrained grace that made Tali—who was tall for a quarian—feel like a lumbering giant beside her. "Smart enough to have your barriers up before they pulled their guns, and you had the element of surprise with that tech mine. Damn thing tore through their shields and knocked them off their feet. Most important is that you kept your head. Guess you've had some military training someplace. That one"—she motioned towards the body of the turian assassin— "might've been a problem, but overheating his weapon would let you get up close with that shotgun. But once Saren got wind that you dealt with them..." She exhaled, taking a shotgun off her back and handing it to Tali. "Try this. M-22 Eviscerator. Better than the piece of shit you have now. Got it off one of Fist's men, so consider it his repayment for setting you up." _

_ "...Not that I don't appreciate the help. Or the tactical advice. Or the shotgun." Which was probably of questionable legality, at least in Citadel space, but the weight of it in her hands made her feel a bit more reassured. "Who are_ _you?"_

_ "_ _ **Fuck.** _ _" The human shook her head. "Forgot to introduce myself. Lieutenant-Commander Joan Shepard of the Systems Alliance. Just call me Shepard, though. 'Pleased to meet you, hoped you guess my name, but what's puzzling you is the nature of my game.'"_

_ Tali paused for a moment, trying to parse that last sentence; she was pretty sure her translator had mangled it. Then she gave up. "What?"_

_ "I'm looking for evidence that a Spectre named Saren Arterius was behind the attack on Eden Prime."_

_ In the events of the last few days—attacked by assassins in Illium, being arrested for stowing away on that turian freighter, getting shot on the Presidium, and trying not to think about the fate of poor Keenah, and _ _ **keelah** _ _, this wasn't how her Pilgrimage was supposed to go at all—Tali had pretty much forgotten about the news report she'd heard about the geth attack on Eden Prime, and of the human soldier named Shepard who had saved the colony from going up in nuclear fire. _

_ The same Shepard who was now standing in front of her, looking at her with those steady green eyes._

_ "Then," Tali said, "I have a chance to repay you for saving my life.")_

For the third time in an hour, Tali opens up one of the news articles that Admiral Hackett had forwarded to them and skims it again, as though the words aren't already burned into her memory. Published mere hours after the activation of the Crucible, it's sparse in any sort of actual details and rich in utter speculation. But she's able to pick out a few facts: Shepard had been discovered in the Citadel Tower, close to death. She had been stabilized and transferred to a medical transport ship, where she remained in critical condition after undergoing surgery.

It's no longer accurate; as Shepard's condition had improved, she'd been moved to an Alliance military hospital in Vancouver that had, through some miracle of random precision, had remained mostly untouched by the Reapers. But it's not the article itself that interests Tali so much as the photo accompanying it. More specifically, the _unedited_ version of it. Taken in some part of the Citadel that she doesn't recognize, it shows several krogan, ones that had been handpicked by Urdnot Wrex to 'borrow' a Kodiak shuttle and make their way to the Tower to rescue Shepard—or to retrieve her body.

Tali recognizes only two of the krogan in the picture: Urdnot Grunt, his silvery-grey scales and piercing blue eyes providing a sharp visual contrast to the others. And Wrex himself, head hung low and surprisingly gentle as he carried something in his arms. And although the caption to the photo says that it's Commander Shepard that he's carrying, it's hard to believe, because she—she—

Whatever Wrex is carrying doesn't even look _human. _It's all black and charred and it can't be her, nobody who looked like that could possibly be alive—

—but it _is _Shepard, and she had survived—

Oh, keelah.

Tali isn't sure what compulsion drives her to keep looking at the photo again and again; perhaps it's the same one that's currently driving her to once again play the recording that EDI had made of Shepard's last radio contact with the Normandy:

_"Normandy—" _That was Shepard's voice, weak and interleaved with the crackle of static. "—_copy?"_

Then Joker's voice, sounding almost panicked: _"Commander, is that you?"_

"_Yes. Got the arms open. Illusive Man already there. Dealt with him._" Another of her stubborn little habits: Shepard never _killed _someone, she _dealt with_ them. "_But Anderson's—_" The static doesn't quite drown out the sound of her desperate attempt to choke back a sob. _"Ground team?" _

_ "Everyone on board, Commander." _Joker sounded close to tears himself. _"Just waiting on you. "_

_ "Don't think I'll be going anywhere. Someone's got to see this—" _Shepard groaned, and her voice grew weaker and more slurred._ "—see this thing through. Least it's a nice view. 'Planet earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do.'"_

"_Shepard! Dammit, you're not doing this again! Send us your coordinates. We can get a shuttle to—_"

"_No can do. Too risky. Fall back when Hackett says. That's an order. Don't make the same mistake again._"

A pause. _"Aye, aye, Commander." _

"_Keep them safe, Joker." _Her voice was barely audible._ "Love you all._"

No more static. Shepard had turned her comm off.

Then Joker's voice, barely more than a whisper: "_Damn it."_

Now that Tali knows that Shepard is _alive_, listening to it again doesn't leave her with the same pained sense of finality that she always got before.

But it doesn't make it any easier.

* * *

Tali isn't too surprised to find Javik standing by the Normandy's memorial wall, his fingertips tracing the edges of Shepard's nameplate as he holds it in his right hand. Although his limp is gone and he hasn't lost as much weight as the others—Tali doesn't think she's ever seen him eat—the entire length of his left arm is still encased in the grey-white bulk of a plaster cast, one of the older medical treatments that Dr. Chakwas had to resort to when supplies began running low.

"It is strange to think that it was the machines to come to our assistance." His voice is quiet, his words carefully chosen. "Such a thing would never have been possible in my cycle."

Tali stands next to him, her hands clasped loosely behind her back. With food in her stomach, she feels much stronger than she had hours before. "The geth are helping. Setting up new comm buoys, assessing the damage to the mass relays, looking for any ships that were stranded."

"You would trust the machines?"

"I trusted Legion. And I think they want to make this work as much as anyone. To prove that organics and synthetics can live together."

"And yet you would have destroyed them without a second thought."

"Yes, I would have. And I'd have been wrong." An awkward silence stretches between them, until Tali breaks it. "How are you doing?"

"I am fine." He doesn't look up from the nameplate in his hand, but vaguely motions to his cast. "Though I will be glad to be rid of this thing. The doctor says she will replace it with something more lightweight once she is finished tending to the 'Joker' pilot."

"That's good. Are you and Liara still planning on writing a book together?"

"We are. But for now, I have been studying the old mission reports from the first Normandy. You were part of the ground team at Ilos."

"I was." Although it's been over two years, the memories are still vivid enough for her to reach out and touch them—buildings overgrown with foliage and rust, dead stasis pods lining a wall, and that awful feeling of trespassing on something that should have been left untouched.

"Ilos was only a rumour during my lifetime, but Dr. T'Soni spoke with me about the place. She wishes to visit again someday. Perhaps I will go with her."

"That might be years away. Even decades." Maybe centuries, but she doesn't say it. Even with the finest minds of the Crucible Project now dedicated to figuring out how to repair the mass relays, it would be a long time before she could return to her homeworld.

_Her homeworld. _Two words she thought she'd never get to say.

She slides a hand into one of her envirosuit's pockets; even through the fabric of her glove, she can feel the rough surface of the rock she keeps in there. She likes to imagine the slight warmth it holds of her own body heat is actually from the sun-warmed surface of Rannoch.

"The wait does not matter," Javik says. "I think I will enjoy seeing what peace looks like. It is the commander who I fear may be unable to adjust."

Tali takes her hand out of her pocket to twist her fingers together. After nearly three months of everyone desperately trying to avoid the subject, it's almost strange to talk about her so freely. "I'm worried about her, too."

They all were. Miranda Lawson had spoken with them on the QEC earlier—but only briefly, and with a strange un-Mirandalike hesitation in her voice that signaled that something wasn't quite right.Shepard would recover. Her overloaded cybernetics had been repaired and her injuries were already beginning to heal. And yet—

"She did not heed my advice. I warned her that she must numb herself against loss."

"My father"—Tali resists the urge to laugh, wondering what he'd think of his daughter _now_—"once told me that commanders mourn losses, not people. But Shepard wasn't like that at all. I don't think she _could _numb herself."

"You know the commander well, quarian, for that is what she told me." As usual, his face is unreadable. "But when we fought the Reapers, the feelings of one soldier did not matter."

She crosses her arms. "But _you're_ worried about her. Some part of you must care."

"I respect her abilities. She is a capable warrior."

"Uh-huh."

"In my cycle"—keelah, she'd come to hate those three words—"there were those who had become weakened by empathy and compassion. They could not cope with the things they had seen." Javik's fingers tighten ever slightly around the nameplate. "The commander had allowed her feelings about Aratoht to cloud her judgment."

"Don't." Tali turns to glare at Javik. "You weren't around when it happened. We didn't have any idea that she'd—" She stops herself, knowing that as easy as it was to ignore, it wasn't _entirely _true.

_(Shepard disappearing from the Normandy for over two days without a word to her crew was...worrying, but it was far from the strangest thing she'd done. But the circumstances surrounding her extraction from the asteroid in the Bahak system were even more worrying, especially since said asteroid was hurtling directly toward a mass relay._

_ Tali and Garrus were waiting when she stumbled through the airlock, her hands gripped tightly around her Incisor—never the M-92 Mantis or the M-97 Viper or the M-98 Widow, _ _ **always** _ _ the M-29 Incisor— and, the perfect picture of calm, made her way up to the cockpit to give a completely unnecessary order:_

_ "Joker, get us out of here."_

_ Shepard waited until they were through the relay before she stood up straight and, without a word to any of them, made her way directly towards the galaxy map in the CIC. And stared at it, stared at the spot where the Bahak system had been as it blinked, slowly faded to red, and then disappeared. She didn't put away her sniper rifle, or take off her helmet, or answer any of the questions being slung at her. Finally, she spoke, her voice barely raising over a whisper._

_ "EDI, what other ships were recorded going through the relay in the last two hours?"_

_ The blue orb by the elevator popped up. "Two Alliance shuttles, Shepard." _

_ Shepard paused for a long, long moment. Then, almost mechanically, she removed the thermal clip from her Incisor before folding it up and holstering it. She removed the thermal clips from her other weapons and re-holstered them. She removed her helmet and tried to set it down on the ledge by the terminal, but she missed and it tumbled to the floor._

_ "'That's great, it starts with an earthquake—'" She said this calmly, then paused for a few long moments, staring off into space. _

_ A silent understanding passed between Tali and Garrus as the implications began to sink in about what just happened. There were lots of things they could say to their commander, but even if anything they said was able to cut through the churn of her breakneck thoughts, it wouldn't have helped. _

_ "'—birds and snakes and aeroplanes—'"_

_ Instead, they took position on either side of Shepard and ushered her towards the elevator, away from the confused gazes of the skeleton crew. Shepard waited until the elevator doors slid shut before she spoke again. _

_ "'—and Lenny Bruce is not afraid.'" And then she collapsed._

_ The next week was difficult. Tali kept finding excuses to leave her station at engineering and head up to the crew deck, but the shutters on the medbay windows remained closed. She and Garrus spent much of their spare time going over news reports that painted an ugly picture of their commander: a mentally unstable soldier exacting some sort of demented revenge for Mindoir. _

_ Cerberus pawn. Terrorist. Mass murderer. _

_ Monster. _

_ Just one day after Miranda had called together the crew to brief them about their current situation, EDI informed Tali that Shepard was ready for visitors. _

_ When Tali entered the medbay, the first thing she noticed was Shepard sitting on the edge of a cot, looking surprisingly..._ _ **calm** _ _ for someone who'd annihilated an entire planetary system. "How is she?" Tali asked Dr. Chakwas._

_ "Physically, she's fine." The doctor looked up from her datapad and responded in a hushed whisper. "What she needs most right now is a friend." _

_ Tali wasn't entirely convinced. Looking over at her commander—legs dangling over the edge of the cot, eyes closed, and completely engrossed in whatever old song she was listening to—she figured that if anything, Shepard would've preferred that everyone leave her alone to listen to her music. But Dr. Chakwas didn't give Tali any time to protest before she left the room to give them some privacy._

_ Not knowing what else to do, Tali hauled herself up on the cot beside Shepard, linked up her suit's auditory feed with Shepard's earphones, and immediately recognized her mistake. Whatever song came through was loud and noisy and at least 150 years old, and Tali winced at the assault on her senses. _

_ Shepard finally acknowledged her presence. "Not a fan?" _

_ "Keelah, what is_ _this racket?" Tali immediately recognized her second mistake. "Wait, don't answer—"_

_ She didn't miss a beat. "The Moody Blues."_

_ "Shepard, this is not_ _the Moody Blues."_

_ "How can you be so sure?"_

_ "Because the song itself says it's by"—she paused a second to check—"Nirvana."_

_ "Yup. Definitely the Moody Blues. And what do you mean 'racket'? It's rock music!"_

_ "It's noise_ _ **. ** _ _Noise, and some guy mumbling." Tali took a moment to adjust the volume. "And now he's yelling. Are those even words?"_

_ "'Here we are now, eat potatoes.' Or maybe it's 'entertain us.' Not entirely sure myself." Shepard shook her head. "Far from their best song, if I'm honest. I don't even like it that much." _

_ "Then _ _ **why ** _ _are you even listening to it?"_

_ "Because I wanted to."_

_ Tali threw up her hands and let out a strangled noise of frustration. "But it's noise. I don't even know how you can stand it."_

_ "Tali, you listen to that modern pop crap. I don't think you're in any position to evaluate the quality of old-time rock 'n' roll and then give it a disdainful title such as 'noise.'"_

_ "Stubborn bosh'tet." She huffed behind her helmet, then waited for the song to finish and Shepard to tuck her earphones away in her pocket before speaking again. "I read your mission report, and—keelah, I can't even imagine. How are you feeling now?"_

_ "Dr. Chakwas just locked me in here as a precaution, and Mordin ran a couple thousand scans of my brain. But if I start complaining about voices in my head or hailing the return of the Reapers, you should probably start backing away. And then find a shotgun."_

_ Tali glared at her._

_ "Oh, you meant _ _ **emotionally** _ _." There was a bitter note in her voice. "You read the report. Probably saw the news, too. I crashed an asteroid into a mass relay. Destroyed an entire system. Three hundred, four thousand, nine hundred and forty-two people are dead because of me. 'All they are in dust in the wind.' Struggling against cosmic winds. How I _ _ **feel ** _ _about it isn't important at all."_

_ Tali crossed her arms. "Do you want me to come back later?"_

_ "No, it's—" She exhaled slowly. "I'm sorry, Tali. You can stay if you want. But really, you don't need to worry about me. I'll be fine."_

_ Tali's voice was soft. "That's what you said to Joker just before you went down to Alchera." _

_ Shepard said nothing._

_ "You've listened to me babble like an idiot about my problems more than enough. Now it's my turn."_

_ Shepard tapped her fingers in rhythm against her leg, before finally responding. "'There's bodies in the water, and bodies in your basement—if heaven's for clean people, it's vacant.'"_

_ "...right." Tali waited, but Shepard remained frustratingly silent. "Shepard, you did the right thing."_

_ "I know." Her voice was calm. "It was the only way to give the rest of the galaxy even a scrap of a chance."_

_ "You don't seem convinced of it."_

_ "I just wish the price didn't have to be paid in blood. Seems like a pretty clear-cut case of the trolley problem. Action or inaction. Pull the lever, kill one person, but the five on the other track get to live." She shifted her weight, crossing and then uncrossing her legs. "They put that problem to me. One of the psych evals the Alliance put me through to make sure I hadn't completely cracked after, uh, what happened at Akuze."_

_ She went quiet again for a few moments. Shepard didn't like to talk about Akuze._

_ "First, I pointed out that there's modern safety features in place to make sure that kind of situation didn't happen in the first place. But if it _ _ **did ** _ _manage to happen, I'd just pull the lever halfway so that the trolley would run off the tracks without hitting anyone. Then I'd go find the idiot who decided to deliberately violate multiple safety protocols and file a complaint." She shook her head. "Pretty sure that wasn't quite the answer they expected."_

_ Tali couldn't help herself: she laughed. Because it was _ _ **exactly ** _ _the kind of answer they'd expect if they knew Shepard._

_ "You know, 'going off the rails on a crazy trolley' just doesn't have the same ring to it." Shepard gave a tiny smile. "I hate that problem anyways. It's too abstract. And it doesn't take into account that there's rarely just two choices, so it just boils down to simple arithmetic based on a false dichotomy. But philosophy's not my strong suit. Sitting around in a room thinking does funny things to my head." She paused again. "Garrus and I talked about it a bit."_

_ Tali's head lurched upwards. "Oh?"_

_ "Yeah." Shepard looked directly at her for a few seconds, and Tali was glad that her visor hid the flush in her face. "You know, he mentioned you went to see him in the main battery a few times."_

_ Oh, _ _ **keelah. ** _ _"I don't know what you're suggesting, Shepard."_

_ "Uh-huh. Nothing, Tali." Much to Tali's relief, she dropped the subject. "But he pointed out that I'd assumed the trolley was empty. So I derail it to save six people on the tracks, and end up killing twenty-five passengers. That no matter what you do, sometimes people have to die so that others can live. If only ten people can fit in a lifeboat, the others will have to get kicked off. 'It's not a deal, nor a test, nor a love of something fated, death.'" She paused. "I think his words for it were the 'ruthless calculus of war.' A star system sacrificed to give the rest of the galaxy a few more months to prepare. Or how many human lives sacrificed to save a Council that rubs my fragile mental state in my face and uses it as a reason to ignore the Reaper threat."_

_ Tali crossed her arms again. "Well, the Council can just go to hell_ _ **.** _ _"_

_ Shepard remained silent for a long time, looking down at her trembling hands, at the tiny cuts gouged out of the heavy skin weave in her bare arms; with a sickening sense of clarity, Tali slowly came to realize that her exposure to Object Rho was far from the only reason she'd been confined to the medbay. _

_ "And sometimes, there are_ _no good alternatives. The people living on Aratoht would've died anyways when the Reapers rolled in, or even worse. Or the batarians would've blown the asteroid to pieces if I'd been able to give them more warning."_

_ "You didn't really have much of a choice, did you?" _

_ Shepard's voice was quiet. "No. Even if it was between two shitty options, I did_ _have a choice. It'd be an insult to say otherwise. I could have just walked away, and—I almost did. But I didn't. I chose to destroy the mass relay, even though I knew there wouldn't be enough time to evacuate the colony. It was the wholesale slaughter of civilians." She closed her eyes. "I killed_ _them, Tali."_

_ Tali had no idea what to say to that. Instead, she reached over and put a hand on Shepard's shoulder. Shepard didn't pull away. _

_ "Funny, isn't it? One of the reasons Hackett sent me_ _in, besides the whole plausible-deniability thing, is because he knew I had a knack for _ _ **avoiding ** _ _what they like to call 'collateral damage.' Instead, I end up turning into the worst mass murderer in galactic history." She gave a shaky little laugh, and then turned to stare at the wall. "I snuck in a datapad to check some of the news reports. Read a few of the more unflattering ones."_

_ Tali glared. "They're idiots."_

_ "I know." Shepard continued to stare at the wall. "I'm not working with Cerberus anymore. And I wish they'd stop dragging Mindoir into everything. But it's not that. It's that—" She shook her head, then went quiet. _

_ "It means they're ignoring the real reason you destroyed the relay."_

_ "Which means that those 300,000 batarians died for _ _ **nothing. ** _ _I might have saved the five people on the tracks, but since they won't move, another trolley will just come along and cut them down anyways. The Council won't even admit the Reapers exist, and Hackett outright admitted to me that the Alliance is nowhere near ready for an invasion. Nobody is."_

_ "It's a good thing you're around, Shepard. You already killed two of them." Tali hesitated a moment. "Well, one and a half."_

_ Shepard should have laughed, or at least cracked a smile, but she didn't. "I appreciate your faith in me, Tali. But—I need you to go back to the flotilla. Do anything you can to get your people ready for the Reapers. See if you can get the admiralty board to listen. Even if we're all doomed, we might as well make them work for it."_

_ "That's a pretty tall order. But I'll do my best."_

_ "I know you will. Good head on your shoulders." Once again, she slipped into silence._

_ "Are you okay, Shepard?"_

_ "Why don't you ask that to the people who lived on Aratoht?" she asked, slowly turning to look Tali directly in the eyes. There was no doubt about it now. She was in one of her moods—one of those restless, in-between ones where she straddled a thin line between despair and irascibility. "It would've been easier if I'd joined them.")_

Tali wrings her hands together, struggling to push back the memories of a desperate vidcall that Liara sent her from the Mars Archives a few months after the Normandy SR-2 had been turned into the Alliance and Tali had returned to the flotilla—_Tali, it's about Shepard, she—_

Not an accident. Not an assassination attempt.

It was self-inflicted.

"None of us knew." Tali somehow manages to keep her voice calm. "We weren't allowed to communicate with her. Even afterward."

That wasn't completely true, either. When Shepard had turned herself into the Alliance as a convenient scapegoat for avoiding open war with the Batarian Hegemony, she'd been put under constant surveillance. Tali had attempted to send a few messages, but outside communication was blocked. But through some glitch or another in the system, Shepard's messages always got through to _her. _

It wasn't easy to forget that Shepard was, above all, a special forces soldier. If she decided that someone was a problem and that the only possible solution was to remove them, she would end their life, without hesitation.

But sitting in a room with nothing to do other than listen to her own churning thoughts did funny things to her head. Until Shepard came to the conclusion that _she _was a problem that needed to be removed.

But not before sending one last message to her closest friends: _I'm sorry. Don't blame yourselves. Love, Shepard._

Maybe she hadn't been expecting anyone to get her message until it was too late. Maybe she wasn't expecting anyone to get it at all. Or maybe she had, and it was one last, desperate plea for help.

One that hadn't gone unheard: the frantic message from the Migrant Fleet wasn't the only one that Admiral Anderson had received regarding Shepard's state.

She straightens herself again. "She wasn't even supposedto return to active duty. But then the Reapers showed up."

Javik was right: in the face of the annihilation of every sapient species in the galaxy, the fragile mental state of the one soldier in the Systems Alliance who knew how to kill Reapers _didn't _matter.

He doesn't flinch away from the subject. "It is fortunate for the rest of us that she did."

"Yes. It is." Tali finally finds the courage to bring up the subject. "Before the final push to the beam—you spoke with her." It wasn't a question. Although they hadn't been on the Normandy, Shepard hadn't broken with her habit of doing the rounds one last time.

"I did." Javik hesitates a moment, before silently offering Shepard's nameplate to her; she takes it, closing her three fingers around it. Although his expression doesn't change, somehow his relief is tangible.

She slides it into one of her envirosuit's many pockets, reminding herself to later ask Kaidan what to do with it. "Did you—were you able to tell how she felt?"

"She trusted you." Javik turns to look directly at her, his four eyes blinking in unison.

"Keelah, I hope so."

"She did. You are one of the few people that have seen the commander at her most vulnerable. Otherwise, I would honour her wishes and not share this with you." He rubs the fingers on his good hand together. "Her emotions have always been...difficult, but I was able to sense a deep turmoil. Her family was slaughtered when she was young. The first time she killed another was in their defense."

Tali wrings her hands. Shepard had never told her that.

"The commander had come to consider the crew of the Normandy as her new family. She did not wish to lose them—_us._"

Tali doesn't draw any attention to that last-second swap of words. "But what about her?"

"She was...resigned to her own fate. As the old human saying goes, 'it is better to burn out than to fade away.'" His voice grows quiet. "I should have been with her. It was where I belonged."

Tali's voice is soft. "You were in no condition to fight. None of us were."

None of them had come away from London unscathed. But of all of them, Tali is keenly aware of how much it had cost the Avatar of Vengeance to be taken away from the battleground of a war he had waited 50,000 years to finish.

"You are right, quar—Tali'Zorah. The battle was no longer mine to fight." He tries to fold his hands together, but the cast prevents him from bending his left elbow. "In my cycle, the races never came together, and there would have been no krogan to drag her away from the jaws of death. She would have been celebrated as the exemplar of victory, but..."

"Your people would have counted her as a casualty."

"Yes, they would have." Javik pauses. "_I _would have. And I would have been wrong."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are ever feeling suicidal, [please reach out for help.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines)
> 
> I debated with myself for a while about whether I should remove that scene—especially since it was completely unplanned, and came as a surprise even to myself. However, I decided to keep it for the sake of the story.
> 
> Shepard's habit of quoting song lyrics (and her love of rock 'n' roll—which led to the Pink Floyd-inspired title) was another of those unplanned things that worked its way into my story. Although my version of Shepard is far from autobiographical, her tastes in music are pretty similar to my own.


	3. ...if we can make it to the morning, we can get things right

_ _

_But up in the distance_  
_Even in the dead of night_  
_If we can make it to the morning_  
_We can get things right_  
_It's been a tough go lately_  
_I hate choosing sides_  
_What we do in the darkness_  
_Will come to light_

\- Arkells, ["Come to Light"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdfRVGAjNTw)

* * *

There had been a time when some part of Tali had held onto the hope that once the war had ended and the Reapers were gone, the nightmares would end and her sleep would return to some modicum of normalcy. Of course, that hope had long ago been shattered. If anything, the nightmares were even _worse._

She doesn't bolt upright and scream, like people always seemed to do in the vids; instead, she awakens quietly, tucked safely into her cot, her arms wrapped tightly around the plush spider that _somebody _had snuck under her pillow months ago as a joke. Nobody on the Normandy could escape her odd sense of humour. Some might call it exasperating; Shepard herself preferred the term "idiosyncratic"—a word that isn't exactly easy to translate to Khelish, although Tali found that "crazy bosh'tet" usually gets the meaning across. Whatever it's called, Tali had found herself the brunt of it more than once, finding googly eyes stuck on her visor when she awoke, or multiple printed copies of a Fleet and Flotilla fanfic with most of the names search-and-replaced scattered in well-frequented areas of the ship.

She hadn't been the only one. For a while, it'd been nearly impossible to navigate certain sections of the Citadel Wards without hearing the Commander's glowing endorsement that "_this_ is my favourite store on the Citadel!"—something a bit difficult to take at face value when every shop in the building was spouting the exact same line.

She tosses and turns for a bit, trying to keep her mind from sneaking back to her dream, one of those recurring ones where Admiral Gerrel hadn't stood down—streaks of fire against the bruised sky as the Rayya shattered apart and cascaded towards the horizon, except it was actually the Normandy plunging into Alchera's atmosphere and exploding as she watched from an escape pod, and the screams of the crew were the screams of her team on Haestrom and a synthesized voice asking if this unit had a soul, and then—and then _she _was falling off a cliff, careening towards the sharp rocks below_—_

It's hard to keep herself from thinking about all the little anxieties and what-ifs that had congealed themselves firmly into the dark recesses of her mind, only to burrow to her conscious mind when she least expects it; like her memories of London, they flit through her head too quickly to grasp onto. She props herself up on one elbow, waiting for the familiar rush of dizziness. It doesn't come, so she gets to her feet and makes her way to the engine room. She settles down on the floor, legs sprawled out in front of her as she tries to match her breathing to the quiet little hum of the Tantalus core.

Maybe it helps. She's not sure.

Finally, she straggles back to her feet and looks over the control panels. Makes a few small adjustments to compensate for the increased power draw of the newly-repaired Thanix cannon and kinetic emitters, but it's almost automatic at this point and can't occupy her mind for very long.

Since she knows she won't be getting back to sleep anytime soon, she digs out a datapad and sits on the edge of her cot to read some of the messages that'd filtered through to her inbox—all high-priority—once the Normandy had reached one of the new comm buoys. After a few minutes, she gives up trying to piece together a coherent reply to Admiral Raan and checks the Normandy's chat system to see if anyone else is up. Except for EDI, all the names are greyed out, including the one at the very bottom of the list:

JShepard - Last online: 87 days ago

Eighty-seven days—_Earth _days, not galactic days. The Normandy was a human ship, so it ran on human time. Shepard had always done her best to accommodate for the different sleep patterns of her non-human crew, just the same as she always tried to speak to them in their own languages. Tali hadn't minded the duty rosters—she was a _quarian, _and had never really lived with the luxury of an actual day-night cycle—but there had been times when she wished Shepard would just stick to the translators.

Thinking about Shepard isn't really helping, but for just a brief moment, she feels _something: _Something other than the bitter taste of helplessness that had become so familiar to her (_"we...left her behind?"_) or the numbness that had slowly begun to creep in once the initial shock of grief had passed, not at all helped by the lethargy that came from a reduced caloric intake.

If for only a brief moment, the thin skein of hope that had stretched out between her and Kaidan when the geth had announced Shepard's survival returns, and it's enough to make her put away her omni-tool and get back up. She begins to head back to the engine room—but then hesitates a few moments, resting her weight against the walls. And when she begins to move again, this time she heads out of Engineering and towards the elevator.

(_It's almost like old times; heading to the elevator and up to the crew deck, rounding the corner to the mess hall. Not just for Tali herself, but for everyone aboard the Normandy whenever they were kept awake by their nightmares or their fears or the anxieties about their future—__**if **__there even was a future, because as much as everyone threw their hopes into the Crucible—_

_ —they just didn't know—_

_ And as the Reapers took world after world, the sleepless nights grew longer, and she found herself on the crew deck more often. Joker, when he was the one who couldn't sleep, liked to refer to it as IA—Insomniacs Anonymous._

_ The first time she'd headed up to the crew deck after-hours was just a few nights after her people had reclaimed their homeworld and she'd returned to her place on the Normandy. She'd woken up from a nightmare—the Migrant Fleet falling, her team on Haestrom falling, _ _ **herself** _ _ falling—and couldn't bring herself to_ _stay in her cot. She got up, headed to the elevator—not really thinking, almost as though movement alone could purge the emotions from her. The elevator was just as painfully slow as ever, and by the time it finally reached the crew deck she'd mostly calmed down, mostly convinced herself that she was being silly._

_She didn't head back down right away, though. She paused a moment, thought about heading to the lounge for a drink—remained undecided and instead lingered by the memorial wall, reading the names over and over, until she finally realized someone else was standing beside her. Tali didn't even need to look to see who it was; only one person currently on the Normandy's crew could appear next to her without a sound. But she looked anyways. _

_ Shepard stood next to her, arms clasped loosely behind her back, quietly looking over the names through a pair of reading glasses. She took a slow breath before speaking in Khelish. "Tali'Zorah. How are you doing?"_

_ "Hey, Shepard. I didn't realize you were up."_

_ "I had to work on some—" She paused a moment, motioning to the datapad tucked under one arm. Despite her best attempts to improve it, her version of Khelish remained clumsy and inelegant, full of mispronunciations and awkward pauses. She struggled for a moment to find the right word before she gave up and slipped back into English. "—paperwork." _

_ "My people call it 'tsakin,' although it more accurately translates to 'tedious job.'" Tali looked over the names on the wall again. "I didn't realize about Mordin and Thane. I'm so sorry."_

_ "I'm the one who should be sorry. I meant to tell you earlier." Shepard didn't fidget; she just shifted her weight to her other leg. "But it slipped my mind."_

_ Tali twisted her fingers together. "How did they...?"_

_ "Mordin died curing the genophage on Tuchanka. Thane died defending the salarian councilor when Cerberus attacked the Citadel. Both of them were heroes. I'll get you the mission reports later, if you'd like." Shepard reached for another object tucked under her arm. "Here. I thought you should be the one to put this up."_

_ "Thank you." Tali's voice grew soft as she placed Legion's nameplate on the wall. "Does—it ever get any easier?"_

_ Shepard paused for a long moment. "'Come on," she finally said. Not even checking to see if Tali was following, she rounded the corner to the mess hall. It was surprisingly empty, with nary a sign of Alliance or non-Alliance crew._

_ "Where _ _ **is ** _ _everyone?" Tali asked._

_ Shepard once again spoke in her awkward Khelish. "I guess I forgot to tell you. I sent everybody else—" She paused a moment to settle herself down onto one of the chairs and take a sip from an oversized mug. "Off-duty. I have a meeting with Councilor Tevos in the morning, so I told them all to get off the Normandy until then. And anybody who gets into trouble is on latrine-duty."_

_ "Do you really think that's such a good idea, Shepard? To stay here by yourself?" Tali made a point to say this in English, hoping that somehow she'd get the hint._

_ "But I'm not alone. You're here." She said this in Khelish, the stubborn bosh'tet. Thankfully, she switched back to English immediately afterwards. "You know, I once read that there isn't really a quarian word for 'shore leave.' It must be a bit of a strange concept for your people."_

_ "On the flotilla, we'd rotate people off active duty." Tali twisted her fingers together. "But we didn't have shores. Until now."_

_ "Guess it'll take a while for your people to get used to everything." Her voice was soft. "You go on ahead, Tali. No reason for both of us to be stuck here."_

_ Tali looked directly at her. "I think I'll stay."_

_ She braced herself for Shepard to get stubborn and try to pull rank, but she didn't. Instead, her short human fingers tapped in rhythm against the table—tap-tap-taptap. "Okay. Afraid I won't be very good company right now, but—go take a look under the cupboard."_

_ Tali grumbled a bit—surely Shepard could do it herself—but complied. What she found quickly made her stop complaining. "Oh, keelah. More dextro chocolate." Even pre-sterilized and vacuum-sealed. "_ _ **Thank ** _ _you."_

_ Shepard took another sip from her mug as Tali sank down into the chair across from her. "Asked around on the Citadel earlier. Not exactly standard Alliance fare, but better than trying to explain to Admiral Hackett that my dextro crew staged a mutiny over the food." Her voice was quiet and serious, and it might've been almost possible to take her seriously if not for her mouth, quirked in a half-smile. "That would be an embarrassing chapter in my autobiography."_

_ Tali would have laughed if she wasn't too busy stuffing chocolate through her filter. Shepard hunched over her datapad, forehead wrinkled and eyes squinted behind her glasses._

_ "When did you—" Tali motioned vaguely at Shepard's glasses._

_ Shepard grimaced. "Not long ago. A reluctant concession to Dr. Chakwas. Can't exactly figure out how the hell a set of artificial eyes can get strained, but..." She dug into her pocket for her earphones, put them in, and picked out some music on her omni-tool. "S'pose I'm starting to get an idea why the Reapers are so damn successful."_

_ "...why?" Tali finally ventured._

_ "_ _ **They ** _ _don't have to do any paperwork. Or interviews with reporters. Or meetings with politicians. Tsakin." She grumbled a bit, put the datapad and glasses aside, and wrapped her hands around the mug as she drifted off into her music. _

_ Tali linked up her suit's auditory feed—braced herself in case she was listening to one of those horrible noisy songs that made her wonder if all humans were partially deaf. Thankfully, she wasn't. Tali recognized it right away. "Dark Side of the Moon?" she asked, although she didn't expect an answer._

_ Shepard didn't respond, of course. Although she may have been physically sitting in the chair across from her, she was far away, in some place of her own. Tali didn't even pretend she could understand what was going on inside the commander's head sometimes—she wasn't even sure that Shepard herself entirely understood. Her behaviour was often incomprehensible, her moods inscrutable, and her lapses into silence almost deafening. _

_ It was a rare thing to see Commander Shepard at peace._

_ Some people listened to music; Shepard breathed_ _it, let it run through her veins, seep into her very being. Draped backwards over the chair with her eyes closed, it was easy enough to think she had fallen asleep—but only if they didn't notice her fingers tapping in rhythm against her thigh, or her lips moving almost imperceptibly along to the words in the songs. Because Shepard never actually sang along to her music—and everybody had learned better than to ask why, for no amount of begging, bribing, or blackmailing would budge her from her usual vague non-answers, when she even chose to answer at all. _

_ The two of them sat together—Tali tinkering with her drone, Shepard humming to herself as she took slow sips from her mug. Both of them pretending, if only for a short time, that they could forget everything that was wrong in the galaxy. _

_ "You really like this album," Tali said once the music ended. "Is it your favourite?"_

_ "'And everything that's under the sun is in tune—but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.' I like that line." Shepard's voice was soft, and some part of Tali wondered if her head had exploded with dark forebodings when the Prothean beacon had carved its message into her brain cells. But she didn't ask. "Probably not the easiest one to listen to, but—I keep coming back to it anyways. Two-hundredth anniversary remaster, so I'm not the only one. Of course, the _ _ **real** _ _ way to listen to rock 'n' roll is on an analog radio just barely picking up a signal from a pirate station on the opposite side of the continent."_

_ "On Mindoir?" Tali asked, trying not to wring her hands. _

_ Shepard grimaced. "Earth. Foster care. A thoroughly unpleasant time for everybody involved. Has to be at night, though. Something to do with the way that radio waves bounce around the atmosphere."_

_ "Ionosphere." The correction slipped out before Tali could stop herself._

_ "Yeah. The ionosphere. 'Fraid I'm not a genius like you, Tali. My head's too full of stardust and sniper rifles." Shepard reached up to run a hand across the stubble on her scalp, then gave a small smile. "Don't know if Dark Side of the Moon is my favourite album overall, but it's probably my favourite Green Day album."_

_ Tali gave a dramatic sigh and let her head fall forward onto the table with a dull clunk. "Didn't you also once say that it was your favourite Metallica album?"_

_ "No, that's Wheatfield Soul," Shepard said without a shred of irony in her voice. She drained the last of her mug and put it aside. "And as for your earlier question...no, it doesn't get any easier."_

_ She'd been afraid of that._

_ "Anyways," Shepard continued, "there's only two reasons I can think of for you to be up here in the middle of your sleep shift, and you're neither running for the clean room or sneaking off to the main battery."_

_ Tali lifted her head to glare._

_ "All right. One reason, then." Resting her arms on the table, Shepard looked right at her. "Is everything okay?"_

_ "I—" Tali twisted her fingers together, almost feeling like a naive child still on her Pilgrimage. But then she looked up at Shepard, into those steady green eyes. "I had a nightmare."_

_ "Thought it was something like that. Nobody on this ship's been sleeping well as of late." Shepard leaned forward a bit. "I don't know if I can help, but I can lend an ear if you need it."_

_ Although Shepard may have been one of the only people she could tell about her dream, it didn't make it easy: watching the Migrant Fleet fall, her team at Haestrom fall, _ _ **herself ** _ _fall. Shepard listened, reached over to rest a five-fingered hand atop her own, and gave it a reassuring squeeze when Tali's voice grew rough and she had to stop and let her suit's recycling systems reabsorb the tears she hadn't noticed were running down her cheeks. _

_ Finally, Shepard got to her feet and motioned for Tali to follow her around the corner and into the lounge. "I know," she said as she rounded the bar. "A bar is definitely _ _ **not ** _ _Alliance standard. But everyone's pitching in to keep it stocked. Anything in particular you want?"_

_ "Just—just as long as it's sterilized." Tali took a shaky breath and flopped down onto the sofa._

_ "Let me see what I can do." She looked over the selection of bottles, then poured some drinks—ginger ale for herself, filtered turian wine for Tali—and brought them over. "You okay, Tali?"_

_ "Yes. No—" Tali took a shaky breath and flopped onto the sofa before accepting the offered drink. "Damn it, I'm sorry. It's _ _ **stupid** _ _, I know. You've had enough troubles without me crying on your shoulder."_

_ Shepard sat down next to Tali, putting her ginger ale down on the table."You'd do the same thing. One of these days I'll be the one crying on your shoulder, and then you can return the favour." Never mind that Shepard _ _ **never ** _ _cried. "But right now, you're the one who needs a friend."_

_ Tali paused a moment as she used an induction port to take a sip of wine. "I—don't know, Shepard. I just keep thinking of everyone I've lost. Of them being gone, while..." She trailed off._

_ "While you're still here." Shepard sat down next to her, putting her ginger ale down on the table. "There's a name for it. Survivor's guilt."_

_ "You said that it never gets any easier."_

_ "Maybe that wasn't entirely accurate." Shepard tapped her fingers against the armrest. "Shit, Tali, I don't know if there's any good answer for this kind of thing. It's not like you just 'get over' something like Haestrom after a few therapy sessions."_

_ "Or Akuze," Tali said softly. "But how do you...live with it?"_

_ "I'm probably not the best person to be giving advice on this." Shepard took a long breath, rubbing one thumb over her wrist. "The pain doesn't ever really go away. And sometimes it's pretty damn hard. But you just have to...take it day by day. Do what you can to cope with it. Eventually come to accept that what happened wasn't your fault. Sometimes even manage to convince yourself that you're okay. Or something close to okay."_

_ She paused a long moment, then slowly got to her feet, crossing the room to open the viewport—a bit strange for her, because she was usually the first one to close it. The massive arms of the Wards stretched out before them, reaching forth to grasp the swirling purple haze of the Serpent Nebula._

_ Finally, she returned to her seat next to Tali, reaching over to pick up her glass of ginger ale. "I can't really tell you how Tali should deal with it, because I'm not Tali. But there is one thing I _ _ **can ** _ _tell you..."_

_She slung an arm around Tali's shoulder and squeezed her into a clumsy, one-armed hug, all the while trying not to spill her drink. "...you're far from alone in this. There's lots of people on this ship that care about you, Tali. Don't be afraid to ask for help if you need it." She took a small sip of ginger ale. "And as a wise man once said, 'Might as well go for a soda—nobody drowns, and nobody dies.'"_

_ "Or some turian wine." Tali couldn't help but laugh. "Quoting song lyrics again, Shepard?"_

_ "What can I say? I'm just an incorrigible bosh'tet." Shepard grinned as she turned towards Tali. "Doesn't make it any less true, though. Anyways, you up for a game of Skyllian-Five?")_

* * *

She had originally intended to go to the crew deck—head to the lounge, perhaps. Ancestors know she could do with a drink right about now, and she might still be able to scrounge up some turian brandy if Garrus hadn't gotten to it first.

But instead, she finds herself on Deck 1, standing in front of the door to the captain's cabin, facing a handwritten sign taped to the door:

** ATTENTION CLONES**

** ATTACK HAMSTER ON DUTY**

She's not _intruding,_ she tries to tell herself as she enters the captain's cabin—_Shepard's _cabin, because Kaidan had taken to sleeping on a cot in the starboard observation deck. Shepard had always kept an open-door policy. And Tali had been in the cabin by herself plenty of times before—before—

Some selfish part of her is glad she doesn't have to go through _another _memorial service. The first one—after the first Normandy had gone down—was hard enough: a closed casket, a handful of Alliance officials, and the last few shreds of the Normandy's crew. A somber affair. Shepard would've hated it.

She's not intruding, not coming up here to mope, not feeling sorry for herself. Instead, she's coming up to check on Shepard's pets—no, just Shepard's space hamster, who had gone through a series of names before his owner settled on the rather-unimaginative 'Space Hamster.' The fish had died a long time ago.

It's not like she hasn't been up here every day since she'd been released from the Normandy's clean room; _somebody _had to make sure that Space Hamster was being fed. And although it would've been easy enough to take the cage down to Engineering...

Maybe she shouldn't be so harsh on Kaidan for doing the rounds.

As she passes through the doorway and into the quiet sanctuary of the captain's cabin, a voice greets her:

_"Good to meet you! I'm Commander Shepard, Alliance Navy." _

Tali glares at the holographic figure as it flickers to life. Its programmer had taken a few liberties with its appearance, because the VI is nearly as tall as her and has curves where the real Shepard had none. Although she has no idea just _where _Shepard managed to track down a bootleg VI of herself, it'd almost seemed funny at the time. But these days, it's yet another reminder of another time—Tali doesn't dare call it a _better _one, because it was far from that.

"_Extranet says you're Error: No connection available for VI model 1.7 AGB, Commander Shepard. Take care of yourself out there, Error: No connecti—" _It freezes for a moment, its odd blank eyes frozen in an unseeing stare, stutters, and then finally crashes. Tali suppresses a shiver as she makes a mental note to figure out just how it keeps reactivating itself. At least the husk head on Shepard's desk is gone.

The room is painfully quiet; the only sounds that Tali can make out is the faint thrum of the Normandy's engines reverberating through the ventilation system and the quiet hiss of her own CO2 scrubber.

It doesn't seem right.

She scoops Space Hamster out of his cage, holding him in her cupped hands. It's a calculated risk—those teeth are sharper than they look, and one well-placed nip would be enough to slice through the thinner sections of her gloves—but right now, she needs the comfort of another living being. Space Hamster doesn't protest as she sits on the chair, absently scritching the top of his head.

"Hey," she says softly, then tries not to laugh at herself—although it's probably less silly than talking to Chatika. "I might have to cut back on your feed a bit. You're getting fat."

Space Hamster squeaks.

"Is that a 'no', then? I guess I should be glad that at least _one _of us around here isn't starving." Tali shakes her head, and briefly glances around the cabin.

The viewing portal in the ceiling above the bed, staring out into the cruel, infinite expanse of space; because only _Cerberus _would think it was a good idea to put a giant window over the bed of someone who'd been spaced, and only Shepard would be stubborn enough to sleep under it anyway, or at least try.

_ (She found Shepard fast asleep—in her own cot. Shaking her head, Tali crouched down and nudged her shoulder._

_ "Hmm?" Shepard stirred, then rolled over to meet Tali's eyes. "_ _ **Shit.** _ _ I didn't—I just sat down for a few minutes—"_

_ "Another bad night?" Tali asked softly. _

_ Shepard hesitated a few moments, then slowly nodded.)_

The fishtank, still missing its glass; just after Thessia had fallen to the Reapers, EDI had reported several shorted electrical components on the top deck, but what Tali had found alongside that was a slightly dazed Shepard standing in the middle of a flooded cabin, her hand bleeding from the glass shards embedded in it.

_("Shepard? What—keelah, what happened here? Are you okay?" Careful to avoid the broken glass and dead fish littering the floor, Tali took a step towards her. "Did you—why did you punch your fishtank?"_

_ Shepard turned towards Tali, eyes holding a strange, haunted look. She lifted her hand to stare at the blood trickling down her arm. When she spoke, her voice was oddly quiet. "My fish died.")_

The holoframe sitting on her desk, displaying the group photo taken during that big party; Shepard sat in the middle of the sofa, arms wrapped around herself protectively, jaws locked in a wistful-looking smile.

_(Tali awoke with the worst hangover ever._

_ "I. Am going. To die," she moaned, burying her head into her arms. _

_ "Belay that, Admiral." Shepard looked down at her, arms crossed. "We've still got a galaxy to save. Also...omni-tattoo?"_

_ "Wait, did I get an omni-tattoo? I don't remember—" An explosion suddenly ripped through the apartment, making them both jump. Tali summoned her drone; Shepard reached for a pistol that wasn't there. "What was that?" she yelped, although it was hard to hear herself over all the yelling and blaring alarms._

_ "I think," Shepard said dryly, "that was the coffeemaker.")_

The guitar case sitting in the corner of the room; the morning following the party, Shepard had arrived late to the docking bay with it slung over her shoulder, joking that if she was finally putting some effort into trying to learn an instrument, a guitar was just a bit easier to sneak onto the Normandy than the grand piano from her apartment.

_ (Sitting on a crate in the lower bowels of Engineering, guitar propped on one knee, Shepard simply nodded at Tali, then hummed quietly to herself as she strummed at her guitar._

_ "Hey, Shepard," Tali said as she crouched down next to another crate to rummage through its contents. "I have a question."_

_ She didn't even look up. "If it's about whether I can play a specific song, the answer is 'probably not, but ask again later.' If it's about whether I can play 'Don't Fear the Reaper,' the answer is 'no, and don't ask again.' For other inquiries, please leave a message after the beep. Beep." _

_ Tali laughed. "No, it's...did you always want to be a—what do you humans call it again? A rock star?"_

_ "An architect, actually," was her response.)_

Finally, she looks up at Shepard's collection of model ships hanging on the wall, remembers the long hours she'd spent gluing them back together—of Engineer Adams sending the shattered fragments through the clean room's passbox while Tali was still recovering, knowing that she needed to do something, to _fix _something, to make up for the things she couldn't fix.

But it was just another painful reminder of another time, one where she and Shepard would sprawl out across the cabin's sofa and carefully assemble them from the kits; Shepard might've been able to strip, clean, and re-assemble her sniper rifle in record time, but she was absolutely _hopeless _at putting together a model ship.

Although she's not sure who put the model ships back in place afterward, they had taken care to put them back in the same positions they were before, each of them telling their own little story: the Normandy SR-1 preparing to deliver the killing shot to Sovereign before it reaches the Citadel; Alliance and turian ships flanking the Destiny Ascension, a Kodiak shuttle departing from the SR-2, an Athabasca freighter making some anonymous delivery to the Shadow Broker.

Quarian and geth ships facing off with each other.

The sound of her own heartbeat seeming to fill the room, she slowly gets to her feet. One hand is still tightly clasped around Space Hamster as she opens the case and rearranges the models so that they're all surrounding the quarian liveship, protecting it from Sovereign.

"That's better," she whispers to nobody in particular, and her voice seems to echo against the walls. Holding back a yawn, she sinks back down into the chair.

"Your owner will be glad to see you again," she says to Space Hamster. He blinks up at her, and Tali briefly wonders if his coat is really as silky as it looks. There had been no pets on the flotilla—too much of a luxury in a society clinging to the edges of survival, too much of a risk to their fragile health—but maybe on Rannoch...

_...if she ever returned to Rannoch..._

"Do you even remember her? She could be so...so..." Space Hamster yawns widely and stretches out in her hand, and Tali can't help but laugh a bit. "...moody. Stubborn. Frustrating_. _Keelah, she could be _such_ a bosh'tet sometimes."

She turns to the holoframe again; it had changed to another picture, this time of two humans that Tali had never seen before. With a jolt, she realizes that it's a picture of Shepard's _parents. _It must have been taken before Shepard was born, because she was nowhere to be seen. And although Shepard took more after her mother—small and slim and wiry—it was from her father that she got her bright green eyes.

They look so happy_. _

The Reapers had been defeated. The Normandy was on her way back to Sol. And, beyond all hope, her best friend had survived.

_She_ shouldbe happy.

"I'm just being silly," Tali says, more to herself than to Space Hamster, who had curled up in her palms to fall asleep.

She gets back to her feet and gently deposits Space Hamster into the cage. Weariness begins to creep in once again, and her eyes drift closed as she allows herself to lean her weight against the wall. So absorbed in her thoughts of how painfully _silent _the room is, she barely registers the faint hiss of the door opening before the room suddenly swells with music.

The _Fleet and Flotilla _soundtrack.

"I didn't _touch _anything!" she yelps, nearly bumping her head against the shelf as she whirls around to see the familiar figure standing there. It's still strange to see him without his visor or the silver-and-blue armour, which had been exchanged for civilian clothes weeks ago when its weight finally became too great a burden for his emaciated frame. And although he doesn't have the same gaunt, sunken look of the others, his plates are still pale and brittle-looking.

He looks back at her, his mandibles flicking back and forth in a manner that Tali had come to recognize as a look of embarrassment.

"Garrus! What are you doing here?" She almost _bounds _over to him, and they embrace, Garrus leaning over to press his forehead against the smooth surface of her visor, Tali reaching up to place a gloved hand against his scarred cheek.

"I could ask you the same thing." He inhales sharply as he shifts his weight off his injured leg and then glances over at the stereo system. "Wait, is that—"

"I don't _know _what happened." Tali groans. "It just started playing when—unless—" She pulls away, strides over to the stereo on the bedside table, and scans it with her omni-tool. "Of _course._"

Favouring his right leg, Garrus limps over to stand next to her. "I think we both have a pretty good idea who'sidea this was."

"_Somebody _thought it'd be funny to program the stereo to play it when we're in the room together. When we get back to Earth, I'm going to—" Her shoulders shaking with something between frustration and laughter, Tali presses one hand against her visor. "Keelah. I was just thinking of how _annoying _she could be. And I thought she hated modern music."

There's a wry note in Garrus's tone. "Not enough to be able to resist pulling one last prank on us."

"Right." She exhales slowly. "But really, what are you doing up here?"

Garrus reaches over and turns off the stereo before either of them can get more embarrassed. "I...uh, came up to feed Shepard's hamster."

"In the middle of your sleep shift?"

"Well, with the news, and all the geth running around earlier helping with repairs, and then having to re-calibrate the Thanix, it—just slipped my mind." He hesitates for a moment. "So...yeah."

Tali crosses her arms. "Well, you don't have to. Because _I _already fed him. As I've been doing _every day. _I just came up to...check that he was okay. Because of the—change of routine."

Both of them go silent. They look at each other, then look over at Space Hamster sleeping in his cage, incredibly fat and content. Finally, Garrus speaks. "You know, I thought it was strange he wasn't eating very much."

"You think that—" Tali exhales, and then shakes her head. "I doubt we were the only ones, either."

"Probably not Javik, though. He'd go"—Garrus does a brief, terrible imitation of the Prothean—"'in my cycle, we did not keep adorable, furry creatures as companions. Instead, they were snacks.' I'm surprised he didn't try_, _considering the starvation rations _most _of us have been on."

"Or maybe instead of eating them, the Protheans trained them as warbeasts." She tilts her head to one side. "That could have been our backup plan. Release a horde of vicious hamsters against the Reapers."

"Nuzzle them to death. And if there's any remaining after that, send in Shepard to quote song lyrics at them until they either shut down or run away." Garrus turns to the model ships, and takes a moment to inspect the turian cruiser. "It wasn't you turning on the Shepard VI, was it?"

"Keelah." Tali shudders. "_No._"

"Good. Damn thing creeps me out. Still, it's been so..." He shakes his head. "Quiet."

"I miss her," Tali says softly. "Do you think she'll be okay?"

Garrus hesitates for a long moment as he continues to examines the model ships. When he finally speaks, the low rumble of his subharmonics filters through her suit's auditory processors. "I think we both know she was never okay in the first place."

Neither of them speak for a while. From the edge of her vision, Tali can see the two of them mirrored against the back of the shattered fishtank, their reflected image broken and distorted.

"Do you—" Tali says, and at the same time that Garrus says "I was thinking—"

"Go on," he says.

"No, you go ahead." Tali crosses her arms and gives him a look. No, not just that; _the _look.

He suddenly remembers that it's probably not a good idea to get on her bad side. "I was thinking—ah—" His mandibles flick again. "I doubt either of us are going to get back to sleep tonight. So—"

"Just spit it out, Garrus."

Although she's still not an expert, Tali had gotten better at reading turian facial expressions, and she's pretty sure that the look on his face is almost sheepish. On the other hand, her translator utterly fails to catch the first part of his sentence. "...Fleet and Flotilla?"

"As I recall," Tali says once she finally gets the gist of what he's trying to ask her, "the last time we tried to watch it, you and Shepard would _not _shut up."

"That was mostly Shepard," Garrus says, and then does an impression of her that somehow manages to be worse than his attempt at Javik. "'Guess you always had a thing for turian men, huh?'"

_"Keelah._" With a groan, Tali presses a hand to her visor. "She sounds _nothing _like that. And _you _kept griping about being pulled away from your calibrations." Not to mention the argument—sorry, _friendly debate—_he and Shepard got into about their preferred sniper rifles.

And then a fight over the remote control that tested Garrus's reach and Tali's flexibility, at least until Shepard jumped to her feet, muttered something about forgetting to go meet Kaidan for dinner, and rushed out of the apartment.

And then using one of the many bedrooms in the apartment to test their reach and flexibility in a far different matter—

"It wasn't _that _bad," he protests, and it takes her a moment to realize he's not referring to her flexibility. "Anyways, just for you, I'll abstain from the witty commentary."

"Hmm," Tali says with a tilt of her head.

"_And,_" he says, "I still have some dextro chocolate."

"Now you're just being mean, Vakarian." She leans closer to him, her voice lowering to a teasing whisper. "But don't forget, I'm still using you for your body."

* * *

They never do get around to watching Fleet and Flotilla. It's still Tali's favourite vid, but right now the forbidden love between Shalei and Bellicus just doesn't seem to hold her interest in the same way that it used to. Not now that she has her very own turian bad-boy.

With a bit of embellishment, it could almost be the plot for a sequel: A young woman—who just coincidentally happens to be the daughter of a quarian admiral—runs into trouble on her Pilgrimage, gets rescued from certain death by a dashing turian C-Sec officer, fall in love, and with the guidance of an unconventional human soldier, go off to save the galaxy. Multiple times.

There had been a time when she had despised him; so confident, so arrogant, so sure of himself. But on the mission against the Collectors, still in shock about the loss of her team on Haestrom, dealing with a ship full of Cerberus personnel, and nobody quite sure if her old commander was still herself, it'd been good to see a few old faces. Even if one of those faces was far uglier than before.

Shepard had been right about one thing: she did have a thing for turian men. Especially ones with scars.

"Just narrowly avoided getting a matching set in London," Garrus says. His mandibles widen to a cocky grin—because despite everything they'd been through, _some _things never changed—and he turns to Tali, sitting next to him on the cot in the main battery. "Though somehow I doubt you'd really mind."

He hands her a vacuum-sealed square of dextro chocolate, one of the last two he had been saving for some special occasion. Finding out their best friend was alive probably counted.

Despite—well, _everything, _Tali allows herself a few brief moments to indulge as she puts it through her filter. Even before supply chains began to dry up, dextro chocolate was a luxury few could afford; sterilized dextro chocolate even moreso. It was practically unheard of on the flotilla. Tali herself had the chance to try it on her Pilgrimage, and it'd been one of the things she missed most when she'd returned to her people.

"Let me guess," she eventually says, glancing over at him. "You tried to block a rocket with your face. _Again_."

"Mako flipped over on us." He starts to lift one talon to touch his unscarred mandible, but hesitates and lets it drop back down. "Then it exploded."

"Don't tell me—"

"And for once, it wasn't Shepard driving." He shakes his head. "Though knowing her, she'd just try to run over Harbinger. All the time I spent calibrating the weapons on that thing, and she decides it's easier to just ram into everything."

"Or drive straight up mountains. I went through _so_ much anti-nausea medication back then."

"I wish Wrex used it. I had to clean up his vomit." He pauses a moment before he speaks again. "About London...you still don't remember it, do you?"

"No. Not really. It's still—" She hesitates. _Still a nightmare, _she almost says as she looks down at the motley patchwork of repairs to her suit, but the words lay dormant. "—coming back to me in bits in pieces," she finally says, unsure of whether she's trying to convince Garrus or convince _herself._

Brief snatches of memory splinter and dance through her mind: the familiar kickback of the Eviscerator in her hands, the sharp rattle of gunfire reverberating in her ears, and a visor smudged with soot and dirt and blood that's not her own. It terrifies her: as much as she wants to—_tries _to— remember, those last few hours in London remain a black hole of memory with ragged edges at the event horizon.

"Things were...pretty hectic down there," Garrus says, an understatement if she ever heard one. "You and Kaidan were right under the Mako, but he was able to hold it up with his biotics. Just long enough to drag you both out from under it, before—"

He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't need to.

"We were lucky Cortez found another shuttle to get us out of there." Garrus takes a shaky breath. "For a while none of us were sure that you'd make it."

He hesitates a long moment. Tali reaches over to squeeze his hand. "It's all right, Garrus. We both made it."

"I know. Remind me to track down a bottle of Serrice Ice Brandy once we're on Earth. I owe Chakwas." He tries to laugh, but is unable to hide the slight keen in his voice. "The thought of losing both my best friends in the same battle? Spirits, it was hard."

"Well, _somebody _had to stick around to keep you from giving all the dextros a bad name." Tali tilts her head to one side. "You know, it's not just krogan women who find facial scars attractive."

"Ahh. Hmm. If you were a turian, I'd be complimenting your fringe, but..." It's almost fun to see him get embarrassed. "You know, I thought you said this was 'just a fling.' But that was before, ah, that night—"

"I _am _allowed to change my mind, you know." Leaning closer to him, she lets her hand rest on his leg. "Maybe I wouldn't mind becoming a one-turian kind of woman."

He shifts nervously. "I figured it'd take some time to figure out what we are. Even though I'm pretty sure we're already past the whole interspecies awkwardness thing."

"Just for the record...still totally worth it." Tali stretches upwards to press the surface of her visor against his forehead, before nuzzling her head into the hollow area of his neck. "Have you heard anything from your family?"

"No word yet, but Glyph found their names on one of the lists of survivors. They were some of the lucky ones. Seeing Palaven burn—" She can feel the warm rumble of his voice even through the layers of her suit. "It wasn't easy. How are your people holding up?"

"Shala'Raan sent me a message earlier. There's some things she wants to talk about once we get back to Sol. About the flee—about Rannoch—" Tali slips a hand into a pocket, her gloved fingers wrapping around her rock. At least her homeworld had been spared the worst of the Reapers. She would have a home to return to. Someday. "I'm really not sure what to call it anymore. I just hope the other admirals haven't gotten up to _too _much trouble without me around to keep them in line."

"Not much like the old days, is it? Burnt-out C-Sec officer and a quarian on her pilgrimage. We're actually _respectable _now." He gives a small laugh. "Though as a certain friend of ours once said, respect comes with a lot of sleepless nights. And something tells me there'll be even more of them ahead."

He gets to his feet and crosses the room. After a moment, Tali joins him.

Garrus sighs. "And the problem with sleepless nights is that you can't just shoot them."

"How did you—" She tries to steady her voice. Because sitting on the bench in front of them is a very familiar M-29 Incisor.

"The Lex Parsimoniae." He reaches over and touches it reverently with one talon. "Sometimes 'Lexie' for short."

"'Lex Parsimoniae,'" Tali repeats, trying not to mangle the pronunciation; it's not a language she recognizes. "And her pistol was 'Murphy.'" It wasn't limited to her weapons: her omni-tool had been named Lovelace. "I always wondered where she came up with these names. "

"I always meant to ask her, but—" He releases his breath slowly. "Doubt I'd get a straight answer out of her anyways. I don't even know what she saw in that damn rifle to begin with, but she liked to say it was one of the only good things the Illusive Man gave her."

"She won't be too happy if she finds out you've been keeping a weapon up here."

"I know. But at least it's unloaded. _And _I'm not pointing it at my fellow crew." He gives her a knowing glance.

"Right." Tali fidgets. With a commanding officer who put weapon safety as one of her top priorities, there'd been no way to wriggle out of punishment for _that _one. She traces one finger along the bench. "She gave it to you, didn't she?"

"Lost my own, if you can believe it. I loved that Black Widow." He shakes his head. "One shot, one kill."

"'But'"—Tali puts on her best impersonation of Shepard (which is still terrible)—"'not when the enemy's shielded. Disruptor ammo on the burst-fire will take down any barriers pretty damn quick. Besides, big guy, the Incisor's more my size.'"

It was a silly argument in any case. Shotguns were _far_ superior.

"Didn't she pull a metal beam off of you in the Collector base? You'd think she could handle a little kickback from a gun." Garrus gives her an odd look. "Wait a minute—"

"I recorded your argument. Do you want to hear it?"

"No. I hate listening to recordings of myself. My voice never comes out right," he finally says, making his way back to the cot and falling heavily onto it with a low grumble of pain. "Still one of the best damned snipers I've ever seen."

"You mean sharpshooter." Another of Shepard's stubborn little phrasings. The word _sniper _connoted the image of the lone killer snuffing out lives with coldblooded efficiency, and even if there was some tiny particulate of truth to be found in the stereotype, she resented it anyways. "And even better than the King of the Bottle Shooters?"

Tali picks up the trophy of a broken bottle sitting on the bench. It's crudely-made—fabricated out of cheap-grade plastic and spray-painted gold. The letters are scratched out by hand on the base and a little difficult to read:

** GALACTIC CHAMPION OF BOTTLE-SHOOTING ** <strike> **2186** </strike> ** 2187**

** GARRUS VAKARIAN**

"That thing was _her _idea." He gives a nervous little laugh. "And it...actually came to a draw. C-Sec showed up to kick us out after a few too many complaints about broken bottles raining down into the Presidium lake. Maybe when we get to Earth..." He trails off. Judging from the photo they had both seen earlier, it would be a long time before Shepard ever held the Lex Parsimoniae again. "We should have figured it'd take more than the unmitigated blast of an ancient superweapon to kill her again."

Tali settles herself down on the cot next to him. "Liara said—" The words catch in her throat for a moment _(Liara slipping off without a word to anyone after that terrible memorial)._ "She said that Shepard's—" _body? corpse? _"—that she didn't look as bad as—the first time—"

It's hard to imagine worse than that charred scrap of humanity lying limp in Wrex's arms.

Her suit VI administers her a dose of antiemetics before she even realizes her stomach is lurching. The SSV Normandy SR-1, so sleek and shiny and new, none of the rough edges or strained engines of quarian vessels, and for a few bright months, her temporary home, limping towards Alchera's atmosphere, the flames sputtering out into the vacuum of space (_Shepard, curled up in the snow, a handful of dogtags slung across one arm and a blackened N7 helmet tucked under the other)—_

"Tali?" Garrus's voice is warm and rumbling, his hand on her shoulder steady and reassuring. "You okay?"  
"I—" She has to remind herself to breathe. "No. No, I'm not okay."

Without a word, he pulls her into an embrace. No words exchanged, just a shared communion of caustic grief for everyone lost—the fallen crew of the Normandy, of their teams on Haestrom and Omega, of his mother and her father and of Kal'Reegar—something that never got any easier.

But she is far from alone in this. And just as the long nights faded into the day, the grief will pass. She will be okay.

Or something close to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Between a ceaseless sense of perfectionism and my health taking yet another downwards turn, this chapter took far longer to write than I would've preferred.


	4. ...i fear tomorrow i'll be crying

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Graphic descriptions of injuries and medical procedures in this chapter.

Confusion will be my epitaph  
As I crawl a cracked and broken path  
If we make it we can all sit back and laugh  
But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying

\- King Crimson, ["Epitaph"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-HytsGYg0)

* * *

**Systems Alliance Naval Medical Centre  
** **Vancouver, Earth  
** **Saturday, July 14, 2187, 94 days P.C. (Post-Crucible)**

It's the pain that drags her out of a nightmare racked with terror: screams and blood and ashes and broken worlds and spiraling out into the emptiness of outer space and two glowing columns, pulsing with a soft blue glow, inviting her.

She emerges into a world that's too much lights and sounds and scarlet ribbons of pain that tear through her mangled, broken shell of sinew and bone. She is painfully aware of each heartbeat thumping through her thin chest, a stubborn little muscle that refused to stop even when all the raw destructive energy of the Crucible coursed through it.

It'd taken almost month of round-the-clock care from over two dozen medical professionals (plus one ex-Cerberus operative) and all the bleeding-edge technology of a salarian medical ship to make sure that stubborn little muscle didn't quit on her, an interminably dizzying array of one procedure after the next: excising a portion of her skull before the fluids inside it could crush the delicate tissues of her brain, scraping away the charred clumps where her combat hardsuit had coalesced with her flesh, shattered bones knitted back together, a half-severed arm reattached, antibiotics and antivirals to ward off the infections sweeping through her ravaged body. And after that, even more procedures: dressings changed, burned skin and muscle and tendons debrided, medi-gel slathered over her raw wounds, grafts of new skin weave, failing cybernetics repaired or replaced.

They were injuries that no normal human would've survived. Luckily, Shepard wasn't normal.

She doesn't remember much of those first few precarious weeks where her life seemed to hang by an ever-fraying thread—of the long periods of drug-induced slumber shattered by brief moments of consciousness spurred on by an ever-increasing tolerance to the anesthetics. The Crucible had changed her. Left her body broken, and her mind broken. Events no longer engraved themselves into her memory, but instead left faint imprints in it; with enough repetition, some of them stuck. Most of them didn't. Some of them still don't.

But she still remembers _some _things. Vague impressions, mostly. The smell of medi-gel, sharp and astringent. The hum of the machinery working to keep her alive. The bone-deep chill that seemed to permeate her, despite the near-sweltering temperature of her room. Pain. Confusion. Fear. Particularly the fear.

Especially when she realized there could only be one reason that the crew of the Normandy—_her _crew—wasn't there with her after she'd been moved to the hospital in Vancouver.

Somewhere nearby, the medical VI chirps something—she thinks that it's supposed to be words, but the only thing that filters through to her pain-addled mind is an indistinct blur of vibrations scraping against her eardrum, just as the world glinting through the narrow gaps of her eyelids is a bewildering smear of colours and movement.

A terrible shiny-grey taste fills her mouth a moment before the steady drip-drip-drip of pain-killing drugs pours through the IV line and into her bloodstream. The raw edges of pain—aggravated synapses sending blue-white impulses through a scrambled nervous system—immediately begin to dampen into something a little more tolerable, something that allows her own muddled thoughts to find some purchase against the ravenous pain that would otherwise overwhelm her waking mind.

She dislikes the heavy, sluggish feeling the drugs give her. But she dislikes the pain even more, so she tolerates it.

The room around her gradually fades into focus, and the dimmed lights of her room don't hurt her eyes as much as before. There is a hard, smooth box pressed into the gnarled fingers of her left hand, the one not racked with the shakes. She knows that if she presses the button on it, the _doc-tors_—she knows that's not the right word for all of them, but it's an easy one to keep in the forefront of her consciousness—will come to her room to assist her, but she prefers to savour these early, unstructured moments in the day free from their ministrations.

Her mouth is dry. She runs her tongue along the lower groove of her teeth, and then decides to try out her voice before the whispers creeping into her mind grow too loud.

"Name is—" The still-healing skin grafts on her face stretch and hurt. Her throat aches from the stale air. She _knows _what she wants to say, but it's hard for her to dredge the words up from the grey murk of her mind. When the doc-tors speak to her, she can understand them. But in her own mind, the latticework of speech becomes unclear: series of phonemes strung together haphazardly, amorphous and without any inherent meaning. It takes considerable effort to unfurl the connections between her thoughts and the words required to convey them to others.

She can remember a time from Before when language came easily—sometimes _too _easily, the words and thoughts and all the associations between them gushing and roiling through the channels of her mind and crashing into her skull until she paradoxically ended up crumbling into silence.

There were many Befores for her: the Mindoir Raid; joining the Alliance; Akuze, N7, Eden Prime. Before Alchera. Before Aratoht.

Before the Crucible.

"—Shepard," she finally chokes out, and she can feel pride filling her—the same pride she felt so many years ago when she first put on the gleaming onyx armor emblazoned with the N7 insignia.

Because as hard as the Crucible had tried, it couldn't take away her name.

_(In the end, it came down to just a deus ex machina: the god from the machine, the seemingly insoluble problem resolved by an unlikely occurrence. Except that there was no god, just a shitty little VI with its broken programming. _

_ She tightened her grip on Murphy—only thing she had left, really, with the Lex Parsimoniae given a new holder and Lovelace shorted out. She held it with her left hand, because her right arm was shattered, hanging limply by her side. The Illusive Man, that backpfeifengesicht, had been able to take control of her with his Reaper implants—but she hadn't made it easy for him, and the result had been something akin to the unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. The limb in dispute had ended up snapping like a twig. _

_ Rest of her felt kind of shattered too, at this point. Heavy blood loss left her with an increasingly looming expiration date. _

_ In the end, the fate of all sapient life in the Milky Way came down to a broken-down soldier with a blood-splattered M-5 Phalanx and a final grim spark of determination to see this damn thing through._

_ **The paths are open, ** _ _the hologram told her. _ _ **But you have to choose.** _

_"Why don't you fucking fade away," Shepard said between gritted teeth. She kept her finger on the pistol's trigger. Not that it'd help if one of those hulking black figures outside suddenly pirouetted around to fire upon the Crucible—for all the clever engineering put into the thing, it felt like a distressingly fragile little thing against the sheer might of the Reapers—but it made her feel a little better. She could feel the rat in her brain spin on its wheel, trying to work out something. The seed of an idea beginning to take root in her mind. "Your solution isn't working anymore. Call off the Reapers."_

_ The hologram liquefied before her eyes, shedding its child-like cast to become a swirling, malevolent vortex of dark energy. Then it reformed itself into a simulacrum of none other than Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams. Clever little trick it'd borrowed from its architects—or perhaps one programmed into it. None the less unsettling though, particularly when it continued to speak in that disquieting child-like voice. _

_ **No, ** _ _the hologram said as it slipped into the form of Admiral Anderson._ _ ** Although you have altered the variables, I cannot do that. I am still bound to these decisions, as you are.** _

_"Bullshit," Shepard tried to say, although the end of the word came out in a bloodied choke. "But you're nothing more than a glorified paperclip maximizer, aren't you? Can't do anything other than what your programming tells you to do." _

_ **We did as we were expected. ** _ _It morphed again, this time taking the form of Legion. _

_ "No." Shepard's voice was failing, growing weaker as blood welled up in her throat. Instrumental convergence. Seemingly harmless goal: make sure organics and synthetics didn't kill each other. But no constraints to make sure that goal didn't become synonymous with 'just melt down everyone into DNA slushies and preserve them as Reapers.' "You didn't."_

_ The hologram said nothing._

_ "And if you won't"—or perhaps can't_ _was more likely—"call off the Reapers—" Then what?_ _The rat in her brain spun faster and faster on its wheel, until it felt more like a train barreling down the tracks. Barreling off the tracks. "Then _ _ **I ** _ _will."_

_ **Without us to stop it, synthet—** _

_"Shut it. Maybe you're r-right. Maybe stopping the Reapers will_ _result in t-the destruction of—of all organics." She coughed, and blood splattered on the floor in front of her. "B-but maybe—it won't._ _And if—if it does, it'll be because of—of our own choices. N-not be-cause some s'posedly o-omnipotent AI deemed it. I'm _ _ **ending ** _ _this."_

_ The Reapers were a problem that needed to be removed._

_ The hologram shifted again—briefly changing into Navigator Pressly, then Thane, then Mordin, then Jenkins—then it finally settled on a visage she was achingly familiar with: one with her own face._

_ **Others will be destroyed as well,** _ _ it said, and although its inflection didn't change, Shepard felt some faint trace of smugness in that little shit's voice. _ _ **The Crucible will not discriminate. All synthetics will be targeted.** _

_"No," Shepard said, as the cogs in her brain finally clicked into place. "They _ _ **won't** _ _."_

_ She let Murphy slide from her grip and clatter to the floor. And turned left._

_ The hologram said nothing more, and Shepard's mind sought to fill the silence saturating the room—a silence that threatened to smother her—and like so many other times before, a song snagged at the edge of her memory. Shepard hummed a few notes, and then, almost in a whisper, began to sing along._

_ "Da-dum-da, dum-da-dum, dum-dum-da-dum-dum—poor ol' John-nie Raaay, sounded sad upon the rad-ee-oo..."_

_ Each hesitant step brought her ever closer to the two glowing columns that would destroy her. _

_ "...da-dum a million hearts in mono...made our mothers cry, sang along, who'd blame 'em..."_

_ Her voice, such a tiny thing against the vast emptiness of the room, cracked for a moment. The pain in her chest and her arm came in great waves that didn't entirely register in her brain. Her steps faltered. But didn't stop. Her voice carried her along, one dragging step after another. _

_ "...uhh, something, somethii-iing...dum-da-more than ever..."_

_ —fuck, she _ _ **didn't ** _ _want to die—_

_ But she had already cheated Death once. And although he was kind enough to wait until she had dealt with the Reapers, Death would soon enough take his due. _

_ She just wished she wasn't alone._

_ "...toora-loora-toora-loo-rye-ayyyyy...."_

_ So she sang. For every civilization that the Reapers had slaughtered in some futile attempt to bring an inessential equilibrium. For all the current civilizations who had come together in the ever-so-slim gamble to end the cycles once and for all. She sang for all the days still to come, for all the generations who thought they had no time left to start again. She even sang for the Reapers, who for all their arrogance could never realize that they were nothing more than a clumsy tool, an instrument of death in the hands of a VI following broken orders._

_ But mostly, she sang to give herself some fleeting comfort in her last moments. Because she knew that if she didn't sing, she would start to cry. _

_ "...and we can sing just like our fath—"_

_ Her voice was ripped from her throat in a silent cry; she didn't latch onto the glowing blue columns so much as they latched onto _ _ **her. ** _ _Her muscles seized with frozen fire. Pain—more than pain, but something that no language could truly describe—hit like a Phillips head into her brain, crawled across her every cell, tearing her apart piece by piece—_

_ —the Milky Way unfurled before her, a perfect golden spiral, and with the Reapers blackening every part of it, a great multitude of black birds coming to pick the man's corpse apart, piece by piece, limb by limb—_

_ —and she reached up and reached out to embrace it, felt it move across her skin, except that her skin was burning away from her body—_

_ —the endless sour yellow note of the Reapers hammered into her brain, great impenetrable walls without time or space, bewildering power that her pathetic little human mind couldn't even begin to fathom, like looking into the sun after being trapped in a cave her entire life—_

_ —no colours and no musics in this place, just a tuneless noise stretching thin across the stars, a silence so loud, she didn't belong here—_

_ —spiral out, keep going—_

_ —until she was one with the Reapers, the essence of every race that they had harvested seeping into her brain, the dying cries of countless civilizations, all stardust and billion-year-old carbon, their pasts and futures and wars never ending carving themselves into her brain cells, and it was too much for just one woman—_

_ —the being that was named Shepard began to slip away from the body holding it, and so she filled her mind with a single thought: _ _ **SELF-DESTRUCT.** _

_At first it didn't seem like it would be enough: she had failed, and the cycle would continue. But then there was another presence with her, another voice joining with her own, a crescendo burning the darkness clean. _

_And the Reapers obeyed._

_ One by one, the machines exploded, just like all the tiny capillaries in her brain were exploding, and in one last gasp of self-preservation her body tried to let go of the columns but it couldn't, and her throat contracted in a soundless scream as her body began to fade away, as her nova heart began to burn out—_

_ —until she found herself ripped away from the glowing columns and shattering into unconsciousness. But not from her own doing. Because although her optical implants had burnt out, the last frame that it had transmitted to her brain was that of an insectoid figure dragging her free from the columns.)_

* * *

The sound of voices—not the whispers, but _actual _voices—outside her hospital room jolts Shepard back to awareness. Her head automatically cranes towards the doorway, her ears straining to scoop up any detail it could in a feeble attempt to decode the half-audible words.

"—sterlund News—" Shepard's mind fills with an unpleasant bile-green distaste that she doesn't quite understand "—Shepard—" They were talking about _her _"—andy's return today—"

There was another voice—another feminine one, but distinct from the first, and annoyed-sounding. "—_not _ready for attention from the damned media—"

The voices ebb and flow in and out of range, before fading away entirely. Shepard slowly exhales and settles herself back onto the pillow. The drip-drip-dripping of the painkillers had finally taken effect and all but dulled the worst of the pain, allowing her to lull into that comfortable twilight halfway between wakefulness and sleep.

She doesn't allow herself to drift completely to sleep, though. She doesn't want another nightmare.

After a while, she hears footsteps on the floor tiles. Turns her head towards the doorway again, even if all she can really see is a sliver of it at the edge of her peripheral vision. There's a waft of delicate fragrance and a blur of movement, and a figure enters her field of vision. Not one of the doc-tors, though. A black-and-white uniform. Pale skin. Dark hair. The only real spots of colour are two blue eyes and a smudge of pink lipstick.

Shepard tries to smile, but the tiny muscles in her face won't stretch the right way. She hopes that it comes across as a smile anyways. The delicate scent of the perfume carries with it warm memories from Before that cascade into her mind: an initial distrust stretching thin before giving way to a grudging but genuine respect, then an odd friendship. A red dress. A pair of blue shoes (although she doesn't quite understand why the word "suede" wriggles unbidden into her mind). Two tall glasses filled to the brim with wine—except that her glass was actually ginger ale, both of them pretending otherwise.

"Shepard," Miranda Lawson says, and Shepard immediately feels apprehensive—there's a ever-so-tiny hesitation in her voice, a near-microscopic tension in her motions. Little details that the deepest parts of her primitive lizard brain are unable to ignore—setting off alarm bells in her brain—_something_is wrong.

Not only that, but Miranda _never _came this early in the day. Shepard had gotten used to the Routines—the comings and goings of the different doc-tors as the hours stretched on, the sounds of their footsteps on the floor, of their faces and voices—she still had trouble with their names, except for Miranda and Doc-tor Michel. But Miranda is here now, and she never is, and that means—

"Norrr—" The word dies on her tongue. Her crew. They were—gone. _Were. _Past tense. But—she can't remember. She knows there's _something, _something important that she needs to remember, but she _can't. _Her head spins. Her breath comes short, the air catching in her chest as the cold panic begins to set in—she can't seem to drag enough oxygen into her lungs, and she's no longer in the safety of her hospital bed, but instead reeling out into the lifeless expanse of outer space as her ship falls apart around her, and she can't _breathe—_

Shepard becomes aware of the shakes in her right hand growing worse, the dark energy thrumming under her skin. Of tiny electrical pulses agitating the eezo nodes threaded throughout her nervous system, nodes that had lain dormant for so long before the power of the Crucible awakened them. Of a faint blue shimmer enveloping her arm as the mass effect fields—her _own_mass effect fields—distort the gravity around it.

Somewhere far away, she can hear Miranda speak to her. Place a hand—the skin so smooth and cool and the fingers not contorted into a permanent half-fist—against her bare arm, where the skin weave had healed to some extent. A static shock jumps between them. Shepard pulls away.

"Crew?" She blinks several times. "Crew! Where—" _Found? _Had they been—found? Not dead? She tries to remember, but it just slips through the crevasses of her mind and melts away. Frustration fills her, a palpable thing pooling in her chest, until it bursts out of her in the form of a scream.

She screams and screams and screams and doesn't even know why. Doesn't know why she can't stop. But at least it drowns out the relentless buzzing in her ears. The whispers closing in on her. The Reapers were gone, but their ghosts still lingered in her mind. She screams until her throat is raw, her emotions spent, and then sags back onto the mattress.

"'m...sorry," Shepard manages to say, although the words feel brittle and wholly inadequate. She doesn't even need to look up at Miranda to know what the look on her face would be: a helpless, agonizing pity for the commander who could barely remember her own name.

But Miranda doesn't pay any attention to Shepard's little outburst. Instead, she pulls up a chair beside the bed and sits down in it.

"Do you remember what happened at the Crucible?" she asks, as quick as ripping off a bandage.

Shepard knows that Miranda hates asking this question as much as Shepard hates answering it. That she wouldn't ask at all if not for everybody pushing for their answers. Twenty minutes between the Crucible docking and the Crucible firing, and everybody wanted to know what happened in that in-between, and only one person knew the answer, and that one person didn't want to answer.

Shepard doesn't even hesitate. "No."

And she knows that Miranda doesn't believe her. But she doesn't push for answers, simply reaches up and rubs one hand against her forehead.

"Heard...um, uh, talking." Shepard inhales, then exhales. "'Damned media,'" she repeats, and the second word brings with it a sour memory from Before, ones of reporters crowding too close to her and putting their cameras and microphones in her face and asking too many questions at the same time and she could only stammer out some half-answer before turning and running away and Udina had been red-faced and yelling at her for it. But that's not what she needs to remember, but instead some half-thought spidering across her brain, trying to crawl into it—

"Somehow," Miranda says, "the media got wind that the Normandy will be arriving in Vancouver later today."

"'Got wind'? Like...farts?"

Miranda looks at her. Shepard doesn't understand her face.

Then the second part of the sentence finally registers in her mind, and she can feel the skin on her face tug a bit as her mouth widens into a smile, a real smile this time. "Normandy."

Normandy. _Her crew. _

"All...okay?"

Miranda gives her another look, and this time Shepard recognizes the look on her face: a long-suffering patience that came from answering the same question a dozen—two dozen? _three _dozen?—times before. But right now she doesn't care, because it was _her crew, _and she needed to know if they were okay.

"The geth discovered the Normandy in an uncharted system a week ago. Everybody on the ship is fine," Miranda says.

"Fine," Shepard repeats again, and she knows that it's not _entirely _true, because she remembers blood and fire and ashes and yelling into a transmitter for her groundside team to get evacuated despite their protests, remembers jumping out of the shuttle at the last second so that none of them would have a chance to follow her.

She knows that her ship had rations for thirty days and that they had been gone for much longer than thirty days—

"Fine?" The word practically spits out of her, even though she doesn't mean for it to.

"All of them underweight and still recovering from injuries, but otherwise fine," Miranda says, and Shepard accepts that answer with a small nod. "Admiral Hackett forwarded another batch of messages from the Normandy."

_Another. _Not the first.

She—can't remember.

Part of Shepard knows she should be upset about this—actual tangible proof that her mind is failing her, that the Reapers had stolen something important from her—but she isn't because _her crew is okay, _she hadn't failed them, hadn't sent them to their deaths.

And they were coming back to her.

"Can please...read them?" Shepard asks, and for the first time since she woke up the Reaper ghosts slither out of her mind.

* * *

Before she leaves, Miranda tells her that Doc-tor Michel would arrive soon to give her one last checkup. Shepard waits and waits for her to come but she never comes and then she ends up drifting off into warm memories of Kaidan and the last night they spent aboard the Normandy together.

Once again, Shepard is pulled out of her half-slumber by the sound of footsteps on the floor tiles, and once again, her head cranes towards the doorway. But it's not Doc-tor Michel outside her room, not the cadence of her footsteps on the tile floor. Not any footsteps that she recognizes.

Normandy. Her crew. Returning today. Probably them.

She waits. The door slowly opens. A figure shambles towards her bed, wearing a white coat, but he's not one of her doc-tors. He doesn't seem to notice her watching as he begins doing something with the machines hooked up to her.

"Who are you?" Shepard asks. Her lizard-brain is practically screaming at her to escape, to fight, to do _something _other than lay here like a helpless lump. "Not—doc-tor." Not crew, either, but she doesn't say it.

The man stares at her. His eyes are wide, his face slick with perspiration. The lumpy part in his neck moves up and down. "I didn't want to—"

"You..." Shepard's brows furrow together. "not...belong here. You should go. Before...get in trouble."

"I _can't,_" the man says, almost a whisper.

Shepard's left hand shifts ever so slightly, her mangled fingers reaching out to grasp the button-box that will call the doc-tors. The man notices, and reaches across the bed to wrench it away from her.

Shepard screams. The man jerks backwards. His head swivels around. He grasps the pillow from under her head, yanking it out.

"Shut _up," _he almost pleads with her.

Shepard continues to scream. She raises her right arm. Dark energy swirls around it. She pulls her arm back, and then flicks it forward in a movement she had seen so many times before. But it doesn't do anything—

—and then the man is leaning over her with the pillow, putting it over her face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was initially supposed to be a single scene. Go figures.
> 
> For those who are curious, the song that Shepard sings is (a badly butchered version of) Dexys Midnight Runners' one-hit-wonder ["Come On Eileen."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbpnAGajyMc) If you were able to recognize it, I applaud you.
> 
> I also posted a cover for my fanfic at the beginning of Chapter One. Apologies in advance for destroying any preconceived notions of what my iteration of Commander Shepard looks like.


	5. ...the water doesn't scare me, it's just the people that i miss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Non-graphic discussion of a suicide attempt, depiction of a dissociative episode.

Out here on the ocean,  
I've been set adrift  
The water doesn't scare me,  
It's just the people that I miss  
  
And the darkness at the bottom,  
Has forgotten what's on top,  
The storm has never ceased here  
And it'll never stop

\- Headstones, "[Devil's On Fire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ1qsji2YTw)"

* * *

Tali awakens from a blissfully _dreamless _sleep, one arm stretching across the cot, seeking out the turian form beside her—but there is none. Propping herself up on one elbow, she sees Garrus already on his feet, staring intently at the orange glow of the haptic control panel as his talons trace across it, and shivers a bit as she remembers those same talons running across her suit the previous night, and then shivers more as she remembers them running across her bare skin—nerve-stimulation programs weren't _quite _as good as the real thing, but they'd both agreed to hold off on a repeat of that night in the Citadel apartment.

At least she was spared the awkwardness of rushing out the next morning to get an emergency injection of antibiotics at the nearest med clinic and still ending up sick for most of shore leave.

She lies there for a few moments, watching Garrus. Or more accurately, watching his backside; he has a nice ass. Finally, she pulls herself to her feet and walks up behind him. "Hey," she says, wrapping her arms around his torso and pressing the visor of her helmet against his back. He hasn't yet put on his armour, so she indulges in the way her body curves into the whipcord-thin muscles of his. "Calibrating again?" she asks, her voice coming out a bit muffled through her obstructed speaker.

"Gives me something to focus on. Kaidan's been pacing around the crew deck for hours now." He straightens himself a bit; Tali releases her grip and easily slips into his sideways embrace, reaching up one hand to rub her fingertips in small circles in the soft, unplated skin just below his fringe. Garrus grumbles appreciatively. "Got word from my family."

"How are they?"

Garrus picks up a datapad and hands it to her. On it is a message, forwarded from Primarch Victus:

_G: Safe on Rannoch. S undergoing surgery, expected to make full recovery. Will be in touch. - C_

Not a wasted word; in these fledgling early days of a post-Reaper galaxy where QEC bandwidth is at a premium and each character of text a precious commodity, brevity became the norm. Tali exhales slowly, a smile forming behind her mask and in her voice. "I'm glad they're okay."

"Rannoch?" He looks down at her, mandibles flared in a questioning expression.

"I _am _the ambassador of the Migrant Fleet, you know. I brought the idea up with your primarch a few months ago. It was a good compromise." And a gesture of goodwill desperately needed after some of Admiral Gerrel's shenanigans over the years, but it's probably best to leave that part out. "Your people needed a place to stay, and in turn they can help us rebuild our homeworld." Help her people to re-learn the skills that had been inevitably discarded in the haphazard transition to a nomadic society and atrophied from disuse in the three hundred years since: civic planning, agriculture outside of the great hydroponic gardens of the liveships, getting along with the rest of the galaxy. Some things were far bigger than old grudges.

She eventually peels herself away from Garrus and heads out to the mess hall. She digs out a tube of nutrition paste—every quarian grew to hate the taste of keleven, but its fast-growing stalks and high-protein fibres made it an important staple crop of the flotilla—and her allotment of the vitamin pills prescribed by Dr. Chakwas.

On the Normandy, it had always been easier for Tali to slip off to a quiet corner to take her meals alone; slurping up her sustenance through a helmet port while everybody else shoveled the food into their mouths was a bit awkward for everybody involved. She avoids the elevators, slipping through the ship's air vents and emerging in the lower bowels of Engineering, in that little hidey-hole that Jack used to claim as her territory. Daniels and Donnelly had both been _terrified _of the Psychotic Biotic, so Tali was always the one to head down to the lower decks to fetch some item or another from the crates, or to check the power conduits down there. Somehow, over the course of multiple conversations laced with biting sarcasm and exchanges of profanity in both Khelish and English (Tali could give as good as she got), and a mutual hatred of Cerberus, they had settled into some odd manner of something akin to _friendship_, one that had continued over the extranet even after the Normandy was impounded by the Alliance.

Sitting down on a crate, she sticks the tube in her feeding port and checks for new messages. They were within range of the newly rebuilt comm buoy network, which meant more bandwidth for lower-priority messages—including the unwanted ones. By the time she's finished deleting three months worth of unsolicted messages for illegal substances, requests for her banking details, and xenophiliac dating sites, she's finished her breakfast.

EDI's voice comes over the intercom, informing everyone that the current drive discharge is finished and that the current ETA is approximately six hours. It'd been the necessity of those discharges that had delayed their return, being forced to take a roundabout route so that they were always within range of a planetary system or asteroid belt where they could bleed off static charge. That was the downside of the oversized Tantalus core—any ship from the Migrant Fleet probably would've been able to risk a more direct route through deep space. On the worst days, her hunger-addled mind had wondered if letting the core overload and fry them all would be more of a mercy than a slow death by starvation.

There's a shift in the a-grav as the Normandy slips free from the magnetic field of some gas giant she doesn't know the name of, and then a slight shudder through the deckplatesas the inertial dampeners kick in and the Normandy leaps to FTL. Tali had once seen a picture on the extranet: an old human photograph from their early days of spaceflight; in it, Earth had appeared as nothing more than a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, a pale blue dot in the distance. And now, after three months of careful fuel conservation and delicate gravity-sling maneuvers, they were finally on a direct trajectory for that pale blue dot.

She can't think of it as going _back, _though. She'd only stepped foot on the human homeworld twice in her life. The first time had been for some well-deserved shore leave after the whole debacle with the rogue VI on Luna. Ashley had dragged Tali and Liara on a "girl's night out" in Rio de Janeiro, a glistening city that teemed of luxury that she couldn't even begin to dream about back in the flotilla; they'd ended up in a bar serving both levo and dextro drinks and Tali learned for the first time in her life just what a hangover was.

The second time had been far different. At least the parts of it she can remember—mostly the tattered, unpleasant, blood-soaked half-memories of London that keep intruding on her mind. But a few nicer ones too: of her and Garrus touching foreheads, a silent admission that whatever this thing was between them was _more _than 'just a fling.' Wondering if she'd ever again feel the slight rasp of turian scales against her bare skin, or his breath against the nape of her neck as he whispered her name in that delicious flange.

Of standing next to Shepard in the shell of a bombed-out building, looking over the flaming corpse of a once-great city, and pulling her best friend, her _sister, _into a hug. She doesn't remember if Shepard said anything to her—she'd lapsed into a bout of sullen reticence in those last few days before the Crucible's deployment—but she does remember Shepard hugging her back.

_(She'd almost been to Earth a third time._

_Arcturus Station: Headquarters of the Systems Alliance. The nerve center of the human military fleet. Home to 45,000 humans. And from the amount of odd stares she was getting, most of them had never seen a quarian before._

_Tali'Zorah didn't care. She stood at a public terminal, her three-fingered hands tapping away at an interface designed for five as she searched through the available shuttle routes to Earth. It was late; none of them departed before the next day. With a quiet sigh, she reached into a pocket for her credit chit. _

_"I'd save the money if I were you," said a somewhat familiar voice from behind her; Tali jumped a bit. "They're not going to let you in to see her."_

_"Councillor Anderson!" She'd thought that sneaking up on people without a sound was one of Shepard's weird little habits, but she quickly reappraised her opinion: it was _ _ **definitely** _ _ an N7 thing._

_"Admiral Anderson, now," he said. "I gave up my position on the Council a few months back. Truth is, I just didn't have the stomach for compromising my principles."_

_"With all due respect, sir"—Tali folded her hands behind her back in her best likeness of parade rest—"I believe the term you're looking for is 'political bullshit.'"_

_Anderson laughed. "I can see why Shepard has such a high regard for you...Admiral?" One eyebrow raised, a silent appraisal of the young pilgrim he had met a few years earlier. _

_Tali neither confirmed nor denied; how he got information of the internal politics of the Migrant Fleet she would prefer not to know, but it seemed that news travelled quickly. "How is she?"_

_An expression she couldn't quite read flitted across his face, and for an iota for a second, he looked almost exactly like Shepard sometimes did—if not in appearance, then in the quiet dignity he exuded, the look of a soldier who knew they were up against hopeless odds but carried on anyways. Rael'Zorah had often had the same look. _

_But Rael'Zorah was also the last_ _person she wanted to think about right now. Damn it all._

_"She'll be okay," he said, lips drawn tight. "Even with all the cybernetics, she managed to do some serious damage to herself. Still waiting to see if there'll be any long-term effects. But they got to her in time. Had to break down her door, though. She was unconscious by then." The rest didn't need to be stated: a few minutes, even a few _ _ **seconds** _ _ longer, and..._

_Tali looked down at her hands, clenched together in a twist of fingers, and gave a silent thanks to the ancestors. "She'll be okay," she repeated. It was hard to believe._

_His movements stiff from recent injury, Anderson walked over to a nearby observation deck. "As she said herself, 'I'm not dead and I'm not for sale.' One of her old songs, probably."_

_"It is." Tali huffed her breath. "You spoke with her, then."_

_"I just came back from Earth. Had a visit with her. Let her know that she had a few good friends looking out for her." He hesitated a moment, bracing his arms on the railing and looking out a nearby viewport. "We're not leaving her out to dry. She'll get help for her...issues." _

_Tali folded her arms, but said nothing._

_"I did try to convince Alliance brass to stop blocking communications from her former crew. Hackett was with me on that, but the rest of them wouldn't be swayed. Too worried about Cerberus."_

_"I wasn't working_ _for Cerberus!" Indignation rose in her voice. "I was working for Shepard." _

_"We both know that. Anybody with a lick of sense should realize that a quarian would be the last person in the galaxy who'd work for those bastards. But you were part of her crew while she was with Cerberus. Not something the brass is willing to overlook." _

_Anderson sighed. His shoulders sagged a bit, and all of a sudden he looked very old and tired. _

_"Shepard's still considered a war criminal. A terrorist. Hell, there were some that argued that we should just wipe their hands of the whole matter and just hand her over to the batarians."_

_News of the extradition hearing had reached even the Migrant Fleet—something that had brought up uncomfortable memories of Tali's own treason trial, of how close she'd come to being exiled from her people, of how the admirals had tried to use her as a scapegoat—and all of the articles about it seemed to be accompanied by the exact same image of a gaunt, wary-looking woman being led into a courtroom in handcuffs; photography hadn't been allowed in the courtroom itself. Somehow, the woman in that photograph seemed to have little correspondence with the Commander Shepard that Tali had known, the one who had shouted down the Admiralty Board for daring to even _ _ **try** _ _ to pin their political bullshit on the quarian who had saved the Citadel from the geth._

_Mere days after the courts had blocked the Batarian Hegemony's attempt to extradite Commander Shepard, Tali had received an email from her—one that sounded more like the Shepard she had known. She was doing as okay as could be expected under the circumstances; some defense committee had relieved her of duty and although she was still technically in detention—"even got a sniper trained on my window, just in case I manage to remove my skeleton and squeeze through the metal bars"—she now had a soft bed and her rock 'n' roll and access to the extranet; she missed their chats down in Engineering and hoped Tali was doing well; and of course Tali was probably busy with everything but if she could find some time to spare her old captain would appreciate a quick message to know how she was doing._

_And even though she _ _ **had** _ _ been_ _busy with duties to a fleet that she felt increasingly alienated from—she may have been able to avoid exile, but she hadn't been able to fully rid herself of the lingering bit of mistrust toward the people who had been ready to cast her out—Tali had been able to squeeze in a few moments to send an email in response. Or try to. The message had reappeared in her inbox an hour later, rejected by the mail server._

_"So I can't see her." She looked down at her hands, fingers twisted together. Part of her knew that it hadn't been much of a plan in the first place: get leave from the fleet, book passage to Earth, show up in Vancouver, and kick up a fuss until whoever was in charge let her visit her best friend. _

_"I wish I had better news for you." He paused a moment. "I probably shouldn't do this, but...I know somebody who can get a message to her."_

_Tali looked up at him._

_"Just tell her that"—she hesitated a moment, the things she was planning to say to Shepard suddenly seeming insufficient. Almost vacuous. Finally, she took a deep breath—"that I love her."_

_Anderson's voice grew soft. "I think she already knows.")_

Tali hadn't come aboard the Normandy with much: her Eviscerator and a few suit repair kits. But she was a quarian. Salvaging whatever she could whenever she could was imprinted in her DNA, and over the past few months she'd accumulated enough of it to fill a crate.

She opens that crate, taking out a quilt and unfolding it on the deckplates. She takes everything out and sets to re-packing it. First, her three shotguns, safely locked in their cases: the M-22 Eviscerator, which had been rendered unusable after the thermal clip had warped from the heat of the explosion and jammed up; the M-11 Wraith, so shiny and golden and new-looking (and highly illegal) that she almost hated to use it; and the Reegar Carbine, a little something she'd adapted from the arc pistol and named after a fallen friend.

Next came the assorted miscellanea that some would call junk but which Tali preferred to think of as precious treasures: scavenged weapon mods and omni-tools from the battlefields, seeds from dextro-based crops stored in carefully-labeled airtight vials, cables and power packs and obsolete components, and more than a dozen rolls of duct tape in various colours and patterns (which, in her opinion, was the prime example of human ingenuity). She digs through her suit's pockets and comes up with a handful of old microchips to be re-purposed, a half-empty syringe of epoxy, and a coil of copper wire too frayed for most purposes, adding them to the crate. She keeps behind some spare air filters, a handful of soft cloths for wiping down her visor, and her Rannoch rock, tucking them safely in her pocket.

She folds her quilt and places it on top, along with her autographed _Fleet and Flotilla _poster (a gift from EDI) and her plush spider; she gives the spider a quick pat and then closes the lid, double-checking that the magnetic latches are fastened.

Eventually, she pulls herself to her feet, straightens her spine, and tries not to think of stepping off the Normandy for the last time in her life. Maybe the Admiralty Board had once tried to hang that ship name around her neck like a badge of shame, but she intends to keep it.

* * *

Perhaps she shouldn't be surprised that she once again finds herself in the captain's cabin.

Most of it's been swept clean; model ships packed away, datapads and books neatly arranged in boxes, guitar case leaning precariously against the desk. Much to her relief, the VI has been deactivated. Although the cage is present, Space Hamster is missing from it; Tali hopes it's not Javik's doing.

She folds her arms across her chest, wondering just _why _she came up here. Then something scoots across her field of vision.

"There you are," Tali whispers. Space Hamster perches at the edge of the desk, and then leapsacross the room. She lunges for him; he's too quick, and darts through the open doorway into the dimly-lit maintenance corridor running behind the aquarium.

Tali follows, just in time to see him scoot through the narrow gap between two pipes running horizontally. She exhales; well, quarians were nothing if not _flexible, _and she drops to her hands and knees to shimmy through herself. Her head and shoulders are almost completely buried in the pipes by the time she realizes that her hips won't _quite _squeeze through the gap.

Space Hamster sits on his hind legs, just out of reach of her outstretched fingers, and squeaks at her.

"Fine then, you little bosh'tet." Chasing him won't work, but maybe bribery would: a few pellets of food to lure him out. She begins to wriggle backwards—and then the fasteners of her hood _snag _onto something, trapping her.

"EDI?" she calls out, voice ringing in the narrow space.

But there is no answer.

Tali uses a decidedly human curse. "_Fuck."_

* * *

"This is all your fault, you know," Tali says.

Sitting just out of reach, Space Hamster squeaks in agreement and runs his paws over his head.

"Bosh'tet." Part of her wishes she _had _let Javik taken him as a snack.

Trapped in the narrow confine between the two pipes, it's easy enough to lose track of time. She has no idea how long she's been trapped for. Long enough for her to realize that no matter _how _she wriggles herself, there's no way to slip off her suit's hood and free herself. And long enough for everything to start to hurt. She shifts her weight several times in some attempt to bring relief to her aching knees and back, but her muscles reject every shift in position as woefully inadequate. Her left arm, pinned under her torso, is almost completely numb.

Eventually, Space Hamster leaves, and Tali is alone. She groans and stretches her right arm forward, in the vague hope that it'll cause her suit fastener to pop loose and release her from this cramped prison.

Instead, her gloved fingertips brush against something.

She immediately jerks it back—spidersis her first thought, her mind filling with horrors involving spiders sneaking aboard the ship on the jungle planet and setting up a nest in this dark crevice and laying eggs and all the little spiders hatching and _crawling all over her_—but after the initial moment of panic she realizes that it's far too flat and rectangular to be either a spider or its nest.

The muscles in her arm tremble a bit as she stretches it as far forward as possible. Her fingertips just barely manage to snag the object, but it's enough to drag it into reach. It's a...book. An actual paper book, the cover brown and nondescript.

It takes a little fumbling, but she eventually manages to prop it open with one hand. The careful, flowing script on the first page makes things a little more clear:

_Shepard,_

_I know things have been difficult for you lately. Lieutenant Vega told me that you seemed to take some small comfort in keeping a journal during your stay on Earth, but that it was lost in the rush to escape. As such, it felt appropriate to provide you with a new one. _

_Please remember that there are people who care about you,_

_Dr. Liara T'Soni_

_September 30, 2186_

Two days after the Reapers had attacked Earth.

Shepard's _journal. _Her innermost thoughts. There was a reason that it was hidden away in this alcove instead of just sitting out in the open on her desk. The right thing to do would be to slip the book into her suit pocket and return it to its owner later on.

She wrestles with her conscience for a moment longer, but her curiosity—what was that human saying? something about it killing felines?—takes over. She reaches for the edge of the page, ever so carefully, even though the paper is thick and of good quality and not likely to tear, and leafs it over to the next page.

She's not sure what she expects to find, but a page full of indecipherable scribbles definitely isn't it. Her suit's translator nearly trips on itself as it ticks through at least three dozen possibilities, discards them, and then gives up with a blinking error about it being an unrecognized language. Somehow, she's not surprised.

In the margin is a tiny drawing of Space Hamster. She's not really surprised at _that, _either.

Tali continues to leaf through the pages—pages and pages of those indecipherable scribbles and numerous drawings of Space Hamster in various outfits and situations, the passage of time demarcated by the dates: October passing into November, and November passing to December.

Then she turns the page again, and this time the words on the page are in _English. _Between the bits that her translator is able to decipher—it's never been good with handwriting, and Shepard's handwriting in particular is _atrocious_—and her own understanding of written English, she's able to at least get the gist of it:

_ **December 20, 2186** _

_They fired on the _ <strike> _dreadnaught_ </strike> _ dreadnought while we were still aboard. Nerves are in tatters. Still feels a little pointless writing these Important Feelings down but its either this or the mindfulness excersizes. _

_I think the rat in my brain took over because everything's a little blurry. Apparently I was calm until we got onto the geth fighter and then I...'came apart' is what Kaidan said. _

_I don't remember a geth fighter. I do remember throwing up in the shuttle bay then nearly getting into a fistfight with the _ <strike> _quarien_ </strike> _ quarian admirals. Even headbutted one of them. True krogan diplomacy—guess I've been spending too much time around Wrex. Though Tali was just as mad. Lots of angry quarian words that aren't in the translater. _

_Kaidan and Tali were both with me on the dreadnought. They were also both on the old Normandy when it went down. It was bad memories for everybody. Probably worse for both of them because they also had to put up with my storm clouds. They don't need to deal with those._

_At least my self-preservation instincts are back in working order. I hope._

The entry is accompanied by a sketch—not of Space Hamster, but of a tiny figure in N7 armour drifting off into space, utterly alone but for the backdrop of stars.

After that, it's back to those indecipherable scribbles. More drawings of Space Hamster. But the entries grow shorter, the dates spaced further apart: January 5th. January 16th. January 29th. Nothing at all in the first three weeks of February. And then she turns the page again, and the next one is in English again, but this time it takes her several attempts before she can decipher the lines of messy, looping scrawl that nearly go off the edge of the page:

_ **feb 22 ** _

_i'm not dead and i'm _ _ NOT FOR SALE. _

_colder than alchera. and dark, too._

_and what exactly is a dream? and what exactly is a joke?_

And immediately following it:

_ **February 23, 2187** _

_Thank whatever deities are out there. Tali found me before I did something stupid and managed to talk some sense into this stubborn brain._

Oh, _keelah_.

_(Tali hadn't been part of the groundside—well, planetside—team when Shepard had made that fateful, reckless plunge into the oceans of 2181 Despoina, but she'd watched the feeds, skimmed over the reports, talked to the others about it. Helped Dr. Chakwas set up the portable hyperbaric chamber—used for depressurization accidents—in the medbay after the Normandy had re-established contact. Seen Shepard for just a brief moment when Kaidan and Garrus carried her in, wrapped in an emergency blanket, barely coherent from the combined effects of hypothermia, decompression sickness, exhaustion, and whatever the hell Leviathan had done to her head. _

_Some small, irrational part of Tali wondered if things would've gone differently if she'd been there—if she could've found some way to keep the Kodiak from succumbing to the pulse that knocked it out of the air. Wondered if it would've been enough to keep that stupid bosh'tet from diving to the bottom of the ocean in a wreck of a diving mech and managing to disable most of the safety systems. But then she remembered the look in Shepard's eyes in those last few days—frantic and not entirely herself—and knew the answer. _

_After the fall of Thessia and what had come to be politely described as the "fishtank incident," they'd all been watching Shepard closely. Ever-worried that she would slip into one of her _ _ **moods, ** _ _or even worse_._So a collective sigh of relief seemed to pass over the Normandy when its captain bounced back quickly. _ _ **Too** _ _ quickly, something that was only realized in hindsight, well after the nightmare had begun. _

_A nightmare that hadn't ended after Shepard stumbled free of the confines of the Triton, because after a stern scolding from Dr. Chakwas and an endless night of observation, she'd made her escape from the medbay and—vanished. _

_The Normandy wasn't a large ship. They were in the middle of deep space. There was no place for her to _ _ **go. ** _ _And yet Shepard had managed to disappear, to completely drop off the sensors and evade a crew actively searching for her. __But as long as Shepard didn't want to be found, she wouldn't be. The only thing they could do was put a guard on the weapons lockers—they weren't taking any_ _chances— and hope that she would re-emerge sooner rather than later. _

_Twenty hours later, she was still missing._

_Tali didn't remember falling asleep—just tossing and turning on her cot, either unable or unwilling to sleep. And yet she found herself dragged out of an uneasy slumber by a nebulous, half-formed idea in her head. She got to her feet and headed to her station, checking the readouts._

_Daniels, who was currently on night duty, looked up at her. Tali debated for a moment whether to discuss it with—no. Keep it to herself a bit longer. Just in case she was wrong._

_"Just checking something. I'll be back later." With that, she turned and headed to the elevator. She thankfully managed to avoid anyone as she made a quick stop at the mess hall. Thermos in hand, she took the elevator to the top deck. _

_Of course, the door to the captain's cabin was locked. Before she had a chance to bring up her omni-tool, it pinged; a message from EDI, letting her know that in the Systems Alliance, admiral outranked staff-commander. The door unlocked._

_"Shepard?" Tali said, her voice seeming to fill the room. Part of her expected to see the telltale shimmer of light refracting around a tactical cloak, but—no. That would be too easy. "Get out here, you stubborn bosh'tet." _

'We're not mad,' _she nearly added, but couldn't bring herself to—while it probably wasn't a blatant lie, tensions had risen high enough in the past few weeks that it wasn't exactly truthful either. _

_Of course, there was no answer. That also would've been too easy._

_She walked over to the desk, put down the thermos, and quickly shoved the husk head into a drawer before it could start screeching at her. Shepard's private terminal was turned on; on the screen was an unfinished, typo-laden message to Admiral Hackett about their new pact with the Leviathans—and offering her resignation from the Alliance. Tali saved the draft and then shut the terminal down. _

_She took a few moments to look over the desk: scattered datapads, an empty whiskey bottle—_ _ **keelah, ** _ _she knew better—and lastly, the array of small amber bottles neatly lined up at the back of the desk. Tali picked one of them up: the container was empty and according to the label, the refills had expired several weeks ago. She put it back into place._

_And then she heard it: a sound that only a quarian's well-trained hearing could've discerned above the quiet swoosh of the ventilation: a small, shuddering breath. _

_Tali crept towards the yawning gap in the wall that led to the narrow area running behind the fishtank, one that nobody had any business going into unless they were working on the power conduits back there. Peeking around the corner, she found exactly what she expected to: the familiar shimmer of light refracting around a tactical cloak. _

_Clever little bosh'tet; if she hadn't caused so much worry, Tali might've been _ _ **proud ** _ _of her. They hadn't overlooked the tactical cloak; it was just about the only way that her life signs and thermal emissions could've remained invisible to EDI's sensors. But even without having to juggle the kinetic barriers, the power cells could only hold a charge for so long. Definitely not the twenty hours she'd been missing. Plugging the cloaking device directly into the ship's electrical system meant she could remain indefinitely hidden, nothing more than an almost-negligible increase of power usage. _

_She brought up her omni-tool and tapped out a message to EDI:_

_ **TZorah: ** _ _Let Dr. Chakwas know that I found Shepard. Kaidan too, if he's still awake.  
__**TZorah: ** _ _I'm going to talk to her and make sure she's all right.  
__ **EDI: ** _ _I will do so at once. Thank you, Tali._

_Tali ducked into the corridor; it was narrow, and she had to duck her head to keep from banging the top of her helmet against the curved ceiling. While an average quarian would've fit in here without any difficulty, Tali'Zorah was a bit of a genetic outlier amongst quarians. She lowered herself to a crouch and moved forward, until she was within reach. _

_"Hey," she said, reaching out to put a hand on Shepard's shoulder. The next few seconds passed in slow motion as she realized her mistake. _

_Whatever state Shepard was in right now, rational thought in the face of a perceived threat—even if said threat was an overly-nosy quarian touching her without warning—gave way to the more base instincts of fight or flight, and with the only path to flight blocked, that meant _ _ **fight. ** _

_The shimmer of light lurched forward. Tali wasn't quite fast enough to get out of the way. A skull connected with her mid-torso, sending her sprawling backwards onto the floor. Shepard's tactical cloak dropped at the impact; her head snapped backwards, the sound of it slamming into the pipes reverberating through the narrow space. _

_"Keelah," Tali tried to say, but all that came out was a strange wheezing noise as she fought to draw air into her lungs. Getting headbutted _ _ **hurt. ** _ _No wonder Gerrel had been pissed. Gingerly, she pulled herself to a sitting position and pressed a hand to her stomach, waiting until she caught her breath again before looking up. _

_Shepard hunched there, back pressed against the pipes, a hooded N7 sweater at least a few sizes too large for her draped over her slight frame. Her breath came in ragged little gasps. The scars in her face had split open again, the gaps in the skin weave revealing angry red cybernetics underneath. Her eyes looked directly at Tali, but there was no sign of recognition in them. Just that odd, distant gaze. _

_How much had she been drinking? Had nitrogen bubbles lodged into her brain after her uncontrolled ascent from the ocean floor? Was Leviathan still somehow controlling her, one of its artifacts having somehow slipped its way onto the Normandy? _

_"Shepard," Tali said softly. For a moment, there was a flicker of something in those eyes—but in an instant, it disappeared. "It's Tali. I'm coming over to sit beside you. Is that all right? Just nod if you're okay with it."_

_For a few heartbeats, it seemed like there would be no response at all, that she had—left them behind. But there it was: a slight shift in her head, a nod. Tali released the breath she didn't know she'd been holding and scooted over, settling herself on the floor next to Shepard. After a few moments debating with herself, she lifted her arm, letting it drape across Shepard's shoulders in a half-hug. Part of her expected Shepard to protest in some way—maybe not in words, but a sharp glare or recoiling from her touch—but she didn't. If anything, she seemed to relax a little, but it was hard to tell._

_"Is this okay?" she whispered, earning another tiny nod. Tali's fingertips began to rub small circles in the knotted muscles of her shoulder. Starships tended to run warm, but compared to other ships Tali had been on, the Normandy was practically _ _ **sweltering** _ _ at times, all its waste heat trapped within its hull when running stealth. And yet, despite that, despite the heavy sweater... "Keelah, you're freezing. Are you..."_

_Shepard flinched._

_"No. No, you're not all right." As if she could_ _be, after a reaper-killer had invaded her head. And she'd been drinking. And she was so _ _ **cold. ** _ _"Wait here. I'll just be a moment."_

_Shepard frowned and made an agitated noise._

_"I'm coming right back." She got up and headed back out to the captain's cabin. Neatly folded on the bed were several blankets, including a quarian-made quilt that Tali had given her after Rannoch had been reclaimed; she picked it up and tucked it under one arm._

_When she turned around, she nearly dropped the blanket as she came face-to-face with Shepard._

_"Keelah. Don't _ _ **scare** _ _ me like that." _

_In the brighter lighting of the cabin, she looked even worse—while the greyish pallor to her skin had faded a bit, bruises had appeared on her face and her eyes were bloodshot. She stood on unsteady legs, looking almost ready to collapse. She'd lost weight, and on a frame that was just wiry muscle plastered to bone, there hadn't been much of it to lose to begin with._

_Even before she'd been struck with her latest mood_ _ **, ** _ _she'd been running herself ragged. Not enough sleep, barely enough food, just gallons and gallons of a toxic sludge that she referred to as coffee but everybody else wisely avoided. It'd only gotten worse in the past few weeks. One of her moods, that much had been certain. But—worse than her usual ones, if any of them could even be considered "usual." One that burned like Dholen: uncontrollably bright and completely unsustainable. The search for Leviathan became an obsession with her: there was no room in her mind for anything else, no other channel for all that feverish energy to be directed, just a frenetic determination to drag it out into the light, to wage war on everything and everyone who stood in the way—even if it was her own crew._

_In the end, that search had nearly killed her._

_"Don't go." It was the first thing she'd said since Tali had found her. Her voice was strangely flat. "Please."_

_"I'm right here, Shepard. I'm not going anywhere." Tali moved next to her, placing a hand on her back. "I know how it feels. Not wanting to be alone."_

_Shepard didn't say anything, but she didn't protest when Tali guided her over to sit down on the sofa and, crouched down on the floor in front of her, wrapped the quilt over Shepard's shoulders. "There. Better?"_

_Another small nod. _

_"You've been drinking." Tali kept any trace of emotion out of her voice, but a disapproving _tsk _slipped out before she could stop it. _

_Shepard winced, then withdrew another half-consumed bottle of whiskey from her pocket and placed it into Tali's outstretched hand. "Can you—"_

_"Let me get rid of this for you," Tali said as she got to her feet. She went to the upper level of the cabin to put it in the garbage disposal, then returned with the thermos she'd left on the desk. "I brought you some hot chocolate. It even has...how do you pronounce it? Marsh-mellows?" _

_"Thank you." Shepard wrapped her hands around the thermos, and began to slowly sip it. Tali sat on the sofa next to her, dug some dextro chocolate out of her suit pocket, and got to work on it herself. _

_Gradually, the vacant look left her eyes and she came back to herself. Tali spoke again. "Shepard, can I ask you a question?"_

_After a few moments, she nodded. "What do you want?"_

_"You stopped taking your medication, didn't you?" Shepard's head jerked up at that, and Tali looked at her. "Do you think we didn't realize?" _

_"After Thessia, I thought—just a week or so. Just long enough to get the fog out of my head, then I'd start taking them again. Then the old equilibrium starts spinning, and the next thing I know I'm plunging over the falls in a barrel." She took another sip of hot chocolate, then put the thermos down on the table. "...Everyone must be pissed at me."_

_Tali took a long breath, and chose her words carefully. "Yeah. We are." _

_It was hard _ _ **not ** _ _to be annoyed with her. On the battlefield, she was the same as always: calm and focused, letting absolutely nothing faze her. But on the Normandy, she'd done her best to strain everyone's patience: restlessly stalking around the crew deck with a stack of datapads, subjecting anyone unfortunate enough to get into earshot with a disjointed tirade—the translators were barely able to keep up with her breakneck speech—which always seemed to be about how they needed any_ _advantage against the Reapers since the loss of Thessia. _

_"I put the mission at risk."_

_This time, Tali glared._

_"Damn it, Shepard," she said, pressing her hand against her visor and not even trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. "It's not about the mission! We were worried about _ _ **you. ** _ _Did you even consider that? That we want to help you, because you're our friend? Because we love you? But instead of asking us—letting us help when we're offering it—you start acting like a narizy em'ashu and scare the _ _ **hell ** _ _out of us by ech'eld rekal nedas"—at this point, she was speaking in a mangle of Khelish and English—"and then start drinking, even though you know what that _ _ **shit** _ _ does to you!" _

_"I—" Shepard took a deep, shuddering breath; Tali could almost see the thoughts in her head running out of control, like an oversaturated drive core about to discharge into a ship's hull. _

_"Just...stop pushing us away. Let us help you." Tali reached over to put a gentle hand on her arm. "Let _ _ **me ** _ _help you. Please."_

_"I— You can't, Tali. It's a problem with my head. You can't—"_

_"Just talk to me. I know I might not be able to help, but I can...What did you call it that time? Lend an ear? Or if you want to talk to somebody else, I can get them for you." _

_"I'd prefer if—if you stayed." Her voice grew quiet. She blinked a few times, tried to take another deep breath, but this time it came out as a wavery creaking noise. "I don't know. I really don't. I thought I'd be used to it by now. Prothean beacons. Actual Protheans. Asari sex vampires. Rogue VI-human hybrids. Reaper artifacts. Knocking me out of my head. Not even sure if there's room for Shepard in there anymore. But this time—"_

_She clenched her fists, then unclenched them. _

_"It's—'Many miles away, something crawls from the slime...'" She trailed off, her eyes getting that faraway look again. _

_"...At the bottom of a dark Scottish lake,'" Tali finished, tapping one finger against her arm. "Try to stay with me, okay?"_

_"It...went through my memories. Wasn't too careful in there either." She squeezed her eyes shut. "Mindoir. Akuze. Alchera. All the storm clouds and befores running together."_

_Tali reached over and took her hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. "Do you want to talk about it?"_

_"...No. Not really." She glanced up at the viewport in the ceiling, but the shutter was closed. Her voice was almost a whisper. "I—I just—I can't screw up like that again. If I do—if more people die because I make another bad judgment—"_

_Her voice _ _ **cracked. ** _

_"I'm _ _ **tired, ** _ _Tali." Something in her seemed to crumble, and then—a quiet sob slipped free. She turned away, but not before Tali saw the first splash of tears roll down her cheeks._

_Shepard was crying. Shepard, who never cried, was _ _ **crying.** _

_"Shepard? Are you—C'mere." Tali tugged on her arm. The rest of Shepard followed, until she was slumped crosswise in Tali's lap, face buried into Tali's shoulder, shaking with cold or something worse. Tali wrapped an arm around her shoulder in a protective hug, resting her chin on Shepard's head, rocking her gently back and forth. "I've got you." _

_"I—" Shepard heaved back another sob, a hollow attempt to staunch the tears that were already flowing. "Dammit, I'm sorry—"_

_"Don't be. My suit is very tear-absorbent, you know." She rubbed the spot between Shepard's shoulderblades. "And right now, you need this."_

_Shepard said nothing, but slowly released her breath and let herself sag down. It was hard to tell how long it took, but eventually the tremours ceased and she slid free from Tali's arms, blinking several times and rubbing at her eyes._

_"Sorry for headbutting you earlier."_

_"Only because I startled you," Tali said. "Don't worry about it. Quarians don't bruise as easily as you humans."_

_"I guess I also need to...apologize to everyone else." She winced, reaching over to pick up the thermos again. "For being such an asshole lately."_

_"Tomorrow." Tali looked at her. "But now, we're just going to stay right here and listen to some music until you feel better. Then try to get some sleep. Ancestors know we both_ _could use some."_

_Shepard raised an eyebrow, a smile quirking at one corner of her mouth. "Are you giving me orders, vas Normandy?"_

_"Well"—Tali tilted her head and crossed her arms—"I _ _ **do ** _ _outrank you, being admiral."_

_"That you do." Shepard gave a soft laugh, then took a sip of hot chocolate. "Tali? Thank you. Just...for everything. For lifting a hand. Coming up here to find me. You know."_

_"Don't think anything of it," Tali said. "This time, it was your turn to need a friend.")_

* * *

Tali doesn't remember falling asleep.

She remembers eventually closing the journal, using her one free arm to tuck it into one of her suit's pockets. She remembers getting more and more frustrated with her current predicament and plotting various ways to dispose of Space Hamster—until he finally returned to keep her company.

But she must have, because she awakens with a start, the top of her helmet banging against one of the pipes. Ultraviolet text scrolls across her helmet's display, informing her of new messages on her omni-tool. Space Hamster, nuzzled up against her arm, also starts awake at the noise she's making and squeaks at her.

"Sorry," she says to him. Her ears strain to scoop up any sound they can—the quiet whoosh of the Normandy's ventilation, the low thrum of the drive core, the slow grind of the elevator as it makes its way up to the top deck. The hiss of the cabin doors as they slide open.

Before she can say anything, a voice speaks aloud: "Tali, are you in here?"

It doesn't take much effort to free her. In fact, it's almost embarrassing how _easy _it is once she has EDI's help. She staggers back out to the cabin and half-collapses against the desk, curling and uncurling the numb fingers in her left hand. EDI follows a few seconds later, depositing Space Hamster in his cage and closing the lid.

"Thank you, EDI." Tali exhales, and then activates her omni-tool. At least twenty messages, most of them being variations of 'Where are you?' She looks up. "Did something happen?"

"Major Alenko called everybody to the briefing room half an hour ago for a meeting." EDI stands there, almost motionless, hands folded behind her back. "When you did not arrive or respond to your omni-tool's pings, I detected your life signs in the captain's cabin and surmised that you had fallen asleep."

"I didnod off for a little while there." She shakes her head. "A meeting? What about?"

"Yes. The major just received a message over the QEC from Admiral Hackett regarding the status of Commander Shepard."

"Shepard? Is she...?"

"I do not know the exact details yet. But considering Major Alenko's current state of distress, it does not appear to be good news."

* * *

A news article published the following day would describe the Normandy SR-2 as a great wounded bird of prey limping its way into the Earth's atmosphere and stumbling to a clumsy landing at the Vancouver International Spaceport on Sea Island. Joker had taken offense to that depiction; Tali herself, after watching the actual video of their arrival, also disagreed with it. Although the Normandy might not be as sleek-looking as a few months ago, the ship most certainly did not _limp. _

Vancouver is the exact opposite of Rannoch: grey, cold, and damp. _Damp _is the main word; rain falls in a steady drizzle, landing on ground already saturated to the brink, as though the planet itself is trying to wash away the residue the Reapers had left upon it. Without anywhere else to go, ankle-deep torrents of water rush through the weary cadaver of the city itself. Sandbags had been hastily stacked, then removed once it was realized it was merely preventing the flood from draining into Vancouver Harbour and the already-overflowing Fraser River.

The spaceport itself is a bit ramshackle: the original glass-and-steel building had miraculously remained relatively undamaged for the entire war, only to succumb to a dead Sovereign-class reaper crashing through its roof following the Crucible's activation; similar stories had filtered in from across the galaxy, about the last casualties of the war being those crushed under the giant corpses plummeting down from the sky. After passing back into civilian hands, the main terminal had been demolished, and a haphazard collection of prefabs had sprouted up in its place.

Even though Tali's envirosuit is airtight and climate-controlled, with droplets of water bouncing off the water-repellent coating of the fabric as she makes the short walk from the landing pad to the shelter of the prefabs, it seems that the moisture hanging in the air is somehow able to permeate through it anyways, making her thoroughly miserable.

Not that the bleak weather had done much to dissuade the throng of spectators to Normandy's triumphant—or not-so-triumphant, depending on one's opinion—return to Earth. Even if all they got to see was a brief glance of the ship from behind a razor-wire fence. For them, _Normandy _was synonymous with _Shepard. _More than just a ship, or a soldier, but a symbol. Shepard herself had hated it—but right now, Tali's trying not to think about Shepard.

Trying not to think about somebody trying to murder her best friend as she lay helpless in a hospital bed.

She can vaguely see some of the others—Liara tentatively reaching up to rest a hand on a distraught Kaidan's shoulder, Joker hobbling out with the aid of crutches, James and Cortez standing side by side—but right now, her own world extends no further than the turian next to her. Garrus's comforting bulk presses a bit closer to Tali. Her hand automatically reaches over, her fingers intertwining with his talons. He gives her a comforting grumble with his subharmonics; although it's not really audible, she can still feel it through the layers of her envirosuit.

There's paperwork to do, of course. Tali's eyes blur a bit as they skim across the provided datapad detailing her official release from being a mission specialist under Alliance command. She uses a stylus to sign her name at the bottom: _T'Zorah vas Normandy. _The clerk who takes it informs her that the Admiralty Board is sending somebody to pick her up.

Despite the Citadel Council being in disarray since the ending of the Reaper War—the Citadel itself suddenly in Earth's orbit and three out of four councillors still in need of a permanent replacement—the Alliance personnel don't put up much fuss about Kaidan using his Spectre authority to cut through red tape and get their luggage through customs.

The rain has slackened a bit by the time her omni-tool pings, informing her that her transportation has arrived. A mech carries her one crate outside, where a derelict-looking skycar awaits. A male quarian, nearly as tall as her and broad-shouldered, is standing next to it; he's wearing a red envirosuit that she recognizes, but _no, it can't be, didn't he—_

"Ma'am." He nods at her.

"_Kal'Reegar?" _Tali just stands there like an idiot, and then her legs start moving on their own. She nearly _rushes _him, throwing her arms around him. "Keelah—but I thought—"

"Rumours of my demise were greatly exaggerated, ma'am." He wraps one arm around her, hugging her back. "The geth in my suit kept me alive long enough for a turian unit to pick me up. Spent the rest of the war recovering in a hospital ship."

"I am very glad you are alive." Behind her visor, Tali was grinning. Kal was like the brother she'd never had. "Wait a minute—I've got something for you."

After rummaging through her crate, she takes out the case holding the Reegar Carbine, and hands it to him.

"This is something I worked on while you were...while I thought you were gone. It's dedicated to you. So you should have it. And Kal? It's still Tali."

"Thank you, ma—Tali." He reaches over and touches her shoulder. "Still working on that, I promise."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are ever feeling suicidal, [please reach out for help.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines)
> 
> Most of the random Khelish words in Tali's outburst (aside from _nedas_, which canonically means "nowhere") were generated with [Rinkworks' Fantasy Name Generator's](http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/) advanced interface. (Unfortunately, I forgot to save the exact template I used.) "Narizy em'ashu" is strong language calling somebody _very_ idiotic, and "ech'eld rekal nedas" means "disappear/vanish into nowhere."
> 
> There's some weirdly conflicting canon about the Reegar Carbine; even though it's an improvement on the arc pistol (which is implied in some text/dialogue to be a recent development as of Mass Effect 3), there's a brief mention in the Mass Effect Andromeda: Annihilation novel about it being available in 2183. Instead of trying to figure that out, I just ignored its existence in the Andromeda games and made up my own headcanon.


End file.
